Who Do You Think You Are?
by oneofthosecrushingscenes
Summary: Daisy and Bobbi are on the outs at S.H.I.E.L.D. They've teamed up with Bucky to keep the world safe—on their own terms. Meanwhile, Natasha is sick of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s mind games, so she gets Clint out of there, and they go on the run. When the two groups meet up, they need to figure out how they can all work together, given the unresolved issues in their past. (Formatting is fixed!)
1. Chapter 1

**Notes** : This takes place just after the end of Secret Avengers, volume 2, and diverges from canon towards the very beginning of volume 3. It helps if you're familiar with the events of volume 2, but I'll be covering all the relevant plot points as part of the story, so it's not a must.

* * *

Swimming is supposed to be relaxing.

She didn't sleep well last night, plagued by confusing nightmares and shifting memories, dreams that she's sure are memories, and waking imagery that she suspects are made-up stories. It's been a few weeks since she escaped from A.I.M. island, and she's growing impatient, having expected her brain to have automatically sorted everything out on its own at this point, but Daisy and Bucky keep urging her to do relaxing activities, and, well, swimming is supposed to be relaxing.

Bobbi drapes her towel over a pool chair and snaps her goggles into place. She takes a final survey of her surroundings, lines up her feet at the edge of the pool, and dives in. Her arms cut smoothly through the water as she warms up with a slow breaststroke and settles into a routine—spreading her arms out, pushing air out through her mouth, checking the floor and walls of the pool for shadows, drawing her arms around and in, rising to the surface, taking in a breath, scanning the outside of the pool for shadows, head back in the water, arms out, air out, arms in, air in, shadow check, and repeat.

She continues this pattern, a little faster each time, until half an hour has passed, then decides the others will probably be up by now, so she does a few slow laps without letting her vigilance falter, then heads towards the ladder to return to the house.

As she prepares to climb out of the pool, she looks around and takes in the area more thoroughly, making sure it's safe to emerge completely. She starts when she sees the figure crouching in the shadow of a nearby shrub, and her body prepares for fight, but it's just Bucky. He's holding himself perfectly still, and must have been for the duration of her swim, since otherwise she would have noticed the movement.

"What are you doing here?" she asks as she climbs out. The water sloshes over the edge of the pool, and she pulls off her swim cap and squeezes the excess water out of her ponytail. She leaves a trail of wet footprints on the deck as she walks over, wrapping the towel around her.

"Keeping an eye out," he responds, standing up and brushing off his pants. "You were exposed."

She considers making a joke about her under-dressed state, not that being a superhero and spy leaves a lot of room for modesty, but the truth is that she's touched. "Got my back, Winter Soldier?" she asks with a grin.

He doesn't say anything, but he tweaks her ponytail as she gets closer, and they head back inside together.

After two weeks in Hawaii, she's already half in love with Bucky Barnes. She suspects that Daisy is, too. How could anyone not be? He has that whole broody-intense thing going on, and that gravelly voice, plus his chest is insane and he clearly doesn't care who knows it, the way he walks around in those sleeveless shirts all day. The best part is that he's completely unattainable, so she's not even nervous around him, and she can just enjoy the endorphin rush.

She's finally starting to understand Clint's crush on Natasha (he won't admit it, but come on), living in such close quarters with her male counterpart. The two of them, Winter Soldier and Black Widow, are so _competent_. Sure, she and Clint can hold their own, but with Bucky and Natasha, they make it all look effortless. It would be nice to be with someone with that much control and confidence, who could take the load off your shoulders.

"Last day," Bucky says. "I was kind of getting used to not killing people."

"That's how vacation goes," Bobbi responds. "The day you start getting used to it is the day you have to go back to the real world. Or so I hear." The last time she was on vacation… she doesn't even remember, honestly. Which isn't saying much, because her mind still kind of feels like Swiss cheese. "I had the weirdest dream last night, about hunting Skrulls in outer space."

"Oh, no, that actually happened," Bucky says. It's become a habit for her to tell her housemates the weird things that pop into her head, and for them to confirm or deny their veracity. "They, uh, kidnapped you and held you for a few years, and you escaped a few times, and…"

"Huh." She rubs the back of her neck. "I was sure that was a dream."

"You'd think."

She'd prefer that this were made-up and that the road-trip-across-America-in-an-ice-cream truck dream had been real, but such is the life of a superhero, she guesses.

When they get inside, Daisy has suitcases open all over the place, with clothing hanging over every surface in sight. She's folding clothing into piles, including their clothing, and she scowls at them as they enter. "Are you done with playtime yet? Our flight is in a matter of _hours_."

They're flying commercial, incognito, because it's easier to blend in than flying privately, and if anyone's looking for them, it's just as likely to be the good guys as the bad ones these days. One disadvantage, though, is that they have to stick to the schedule. Still, as far as Bobbi knows, their flight is scheduled for tonight, which should leave them plenty of time.

"What's going on?" Bobbi asks.

"Change of plans, it turns out. Fury's original safe house turned out to be less than. He's got another place set up for us in Philadelphia, but the flight leaves at noon."

And they need to get to the airport as early as possible, to scope it out and make sure they're not being tailed. That doesn't leave much time to shower, dress, eat, and pack.

"Fine. What's this job he's got set up for us, anyway?"

"Hard to say. It's just wild rumors so far. He's going to want you to get into an undercover A.I.M. lab in Jersey as soon as possible and grab some intel."

"Shouldn't be a problem," Bobbi says. "The way they've been so aggressive in trying to recruit me lately, I could probably just show up at the front door and they'd invite me in."

"Hilarious."

Bobbi takes a towel and a change of clothing from the couch and heads towards the shower.

"Daisy, did you rearrange my suitcase?" Bucky asks in the background.

"It, um, wasn't organized."

"It was _packed_!"

"It's packed better now."

"You'd better not have lost my sunglasses."

"I moved your sunglasses to your carry-on."

" _God_ , Johnson."

Bobbi hates being crowded. Tight spaces alone aren't a problem for her, but the jostling, the sounds, the feeling of a stranger's hot breath on her—it's not for her. The flights, first to LAX and then the connection to Philly, are a trial, especially because part of their disguise involves sitting separately, and right now, the guy on her left keeps sneezing, while the woman on her right is doing some work on a laptop and cannot keep her elbows to herself. It's not her fault that the seats are designed without the concept of personal space or breathing room, but _ugh_.

In order to distract herself, Bobbi closes her eyes and plays a memory game, willing faces into her head and matching them up with what she knows about them.

 _Daisy Johnson_. Sometimes known as Quake. Mutant. No, Inhuman, formerly mistaken for a mutant. Occasionally an Avenger. Teenaged director of S.H.I.E.L.D. for, like, a week. Trained by Fury.

 _Nick Fury_. Eyepatch. Howling commandos. She always has to fight to keep a straight face whenever she hears the word "commando." Has one living son son, also with an eyepatch.

 _Nick Fury, Jr_. Used to be called by a different name. Works with S.H.I.E.L.D. She's doesn't know if he's a player or a pawn. Friends with Coulson.

 _Phil Coulson_. Knows more than he lets on. Secretly a huge Hawkeye fan. Like, huge. She's not sure if this is true or not.

 _Clint Barton_. A grown man with hair the color of straw. Says "howling commandos" more than he needs to, because it amuses him to watch her struggle not to smile.

 _Steve Rogers_. Same hair as Clint. Her childhood hero, along with at least two-thirds of all Americans. She still wants to be him when she grows up.

 _Bucky Barnes_. Somehow simultaneously Captain America's goofy sidekick and America's poster bad boy. A new sex icon for a new age. He and Natasha were deeply, inspiringly in love until recently, when she was brainwashed and her memories of him were erased.

 _Natasha Romanova_. The Black Widow. Sure, there are other Black Widows, but she's The Black Widow. The best there is at what she does, and what she does best is magnificent. Since her memories of Bucky were erased, she's become very close with Clint, which is fine.

It hurts when she thinks about Clint, and she's not sure why, so she avoids it. She knows the basics: arrows, ex-husband, tried dating for a while, now they're just friends. He's moved on. Which is what exes are supposed to do. They get along great, so there's no reason she should feel like fire ants are eating her from the inside out whenever his image pops into her head.

 _Dominic Fortune_. Another member of the Eternal Youth club. Very flirty. Not blond. Never had a chance with her.

 _Maria Hill_.

Her head starts to pound, and she forces herself to fight through it.

 _Maria Hill_. Cares about the big picture. Does what needs to be done.

It wasn't personal.

 _Ka-Zar_. Jungle guy. She was into that, once upon a time.

She continues this game until she's able to block out everything else, and before she knows it, they've started their descent.

They find the key in the locker, and the car in the parking lot, as per the instructions Daisy has written down. On the way to the safe house, they go over tomorrow's plan. She's HQ, as usual. Bobbi and Bucky will drive up in the early hours, she'll sneak in, and he'll be her eyes. She needs to stay out of sight, wait until someone leaves their station unattended, get as much data as she can, then get back to her hiding spot and sneak out without getting noticed. She makes a mental note to pick up a shitload of snacks.

They find a parking spot around the corner from the apartment, which turns out to be a walkup on the second floor, with a few bushes surrounding the building, which will be useful if they need to make any window escapes.

Daisy unlocks the door and they file inside. The entrance leads directly into a living room, with couches, two lounge chairs, and a TV at the far end, and a simple white work desk with bookcases closer to the door, next to the window. She notes the fire escape for possible future reference.

The three of them move further into the apartment and start looking around. After the living room, there's a hallway leading to multiple bedrooms. Daisy walks in and drops her bags in the first room. The next two are another mid-sized one and a large master bedroom, with both a king-sized bed and a couch/daybed with a small table next to it.

"You take the big one," Bucky says to Bobbi. "Large spaces make me nervous."

She notices the sliding door, which leads to a narrow balcony that stretches along the northern edge of the building, connecting the three bedrooms. Easy to get in, easy to get out.

There's another bedroom, smaller, right across from hers. She figures they can set it up as a gym while they're there. Fury's set them up in the lap of luxury, comparatively.

Daisy's voice calls out from down the hall. "Bug check!"

Bobbi sighs. "Can't I take a nap first?"

"No, bug check is the first thing we do."

"But if there are any bugs here, Fury was probably the one who planted them in the first place. Don't you think he'll be mad if we mess them up?"

"On the contrary," Bucky says. "He'll be proud of Daisy for being so disciplined."

They comb the apartment down five times, beginning to end, and when they're satisfied that they've gotten everything, they toss all of the listening equipment into a box which they place in the hall bathroom, under the sink.

"So do we destroy them or just lock them away?" Bobbi asks.

Daisy sticks her hand into her pocket, fishes around and pulls out a small device. "White noise generator." She twists something on it, then drops it into the box with the bugs. "We should be good to go."

"Glad to hear it," Bobbi says. "Wake me up for dinner."

She's asleep before her head hits the pillow.


	2. Chapter 2

Bobbi wakes up mid-afternoon to a grumbling stomach, and when she gets to the living room, she can hear Daisy ordering pizza. Bucky is napping, stretched out on the couch, in black pants that sit low on his hips and another of those form-fitting ribbed undershirts, pecs practically bursting out the edges.

"And one vegetarian," Daisy says into the phone. "Peppers, onions, and mushroom."

Tearing her gaze away from the exquisite male specimen in front of her, Bobbi sinks into the empty couch and looks around. Daisy's standing in the kitchen, leaning on the marble counter of the pass-through window, her long side bangs hanging down and obscuring her face as she gives over their address. Right now, she looks like kid she is, instead of a disgraced ex-director of an international spy organization who's had the weight of the world on her shoulders since she was fourteen.

After hanging up, Daisy hops up and slides through the pass-through, then seats herself in a stuffed chair between the couches. "Twenty minutes," she says.

"Twenty minutes what?" Bucky mumbles from his couch, eyes still closed.

By the time the pizza arrives, Bucky's awake. Daisy pays the delivery guy, while Bobbi brings the boxes to the kitchen table, and the three of them dig into the pizzas like they've barely eaten anything in the past 24 hours, which is true.

"About tomorrow," Daisy says, after they've settled in. "Keep in mind: we have all day, and blowing our cover will make the whole thing useless. Make sure you get in there before the first person shows up for work, and do not attract attention. You're looking for a very specific workstation. Don't stray from the mission parameters."

"Got it." Bobbi nods.

"The computers used for this project are cut off from the rest of the network, so there's not much to copy," Daisy continues. "But that's all we need. Your actual time in the open should be no more than five minutes."

"Sounds fun."

"Again, the specific intel we're looking for will not be so much as referenced in any of their computers aside from these two laptops whose owners bring back and forth with them to work, so don't risk getting caught by wandering around early in the morning before you expect people show up."

Bobbi rolls her eyes. "Also known as, 'don't stray from the mission parameters.' I _got it_ , boss. I'm a professional."

"Okay, okay." Daisy brushes her bangs out of her eyes and exhales.

Bobbi hands her another slice of pizza. "Relax. It'll be fine."

"Thanks," Daisy says, biting into the peace offering.

"Rest of today is free, right?" Bucky asks Daisy, and at her nod, he continues, "We should get some sparring in. Bobbi, you up for it?"

She's stiff from mostly sitting still for nearly a day. "Definitely. Just need to warm up first. Daisy?"

"I've got winners."

"I look forward to taking you both down, then." She grins.

Daisy suggests a park down the block as a location, which turns out to be perfect. It's a big space, with a playground at one end, a baseball diamond at another, and a big open grassy area surrounded by trees. Daisy sets up a blanket while Bobbi and Bucky do some dynamic stretches to warm up.

The advantage of not having superpowers or bionic extremities is that she doesn't need to pull her punches to the same extent that the others do when sparring, which is how she ends up beating both Bucky and Daisy, as promised. Afterwards, her victims face off against each other and go for a good long time, as Bobbi cheers them both on. By the end, they're just having fun, and neither one goes down. When they're finally bored, they join her on the grass, and they all watch the sun set through the trees before heading back to the apartment.

They veg out and watch television for a few hours, until Daisy turns off the TV and orders them to go to sleep, saying to Bobbi, "You don't want to be captured and tortured because some evil scientist heard you snoring in the ceiling vents."

"Fury will tease you mercilessly about that," Bucky adds. "And since you're both going to live forever, that might get annoying after a while."

"Two-hundred-year-old Fury and Mockingbird as odd-couple roommates." Daisy laughs. "I'd watch that sitcom."

Bobbi throws a shoe at her.

After brushing her teeth and dressing down, Bobbi rolls up the throw rug in the bedroom and lays out her yoga mat. She'd never tried yoga until Hawaii, and it's very different than any other exercise she does, but she likes it. And while technically, she doesn't need a mat for these meditations, the cerulean color of the mat always cheers her up, and the squishy texture makes her toes happy.

She sits down on the mat with her legs folded, and places her hands on her thighs, palms up. Careful to be mindful of her breathing, she closes her eyes and starts to focus on each body part, one at a time. Her head—there's a slight ache to it, which paradoxically becomes more bearable the more she allows herself to feel it. Moving on to her jaw, which she consciously relaxes, her neck, her shoulders, which she always needs to adjust, her torso, back, abdomen, pelvis, legs, and toes. She times her breath as she does this: five seconds in through the nose, five seconds out through the mouth. When she finishes, she adjusts her pose, setting her feet flat on the floor, knees up in the air, back slightly curled.

With this, she begins her kirtan kriya exercises, making the prescribed sounds, aligning her fingers using the pattern Bucky taught her. He learned the techniques when he'd first regained his memories, and he said that the daily meditations had helped his brain make sense of everything that had originally seemed overwhelming.

When she finishes, she takes a longer inhale, for a full ten seconds, and stretches up her arms. She brings her palms together and down to her chest, exhales, and opens her eyes.

The room is dim, with just a small lamp on the nightstand to add some light. She feels better, like she's wrapped in a warm blanket and doesn't want to move. But she has a job in a few hours, so she gets up, turns off the lamp, and crawls into bed.

Two o'clock Eastern Time is 8 PM in Hawaii, so she has no problem waking up when her alarm goes off. She practically jumps out of bed, ready to get to work. After a quick, cold shower, she dresses in a black jumpsuit, covers it up with a sweatshirt, and heads out to the living room, where Bucky is putting on his shoes. There's a white lab coat folded up on the couch, with a brown wig laid out on top of it, so she can walk right out the front door when they finish up, and Bobbi takes them and packs them into a briefcase. Daisy is still sleeping, since she won't be needed until they're in place.

The drive to Edison is about an hour long, and they stop for snacks, as planned, so that by the time they arrive, it's almost four. Bobbi takes the bag with her equipment, and they walk around the building until they find an open window six floors up, and Bobbi takes out the suction cup scaling equipment from the briefcase, wraps two around her knees and takes two in her hands, and starts to climb.

Once she gets inside, the first step is to find the surveillance equipment and set it to loop to cover her tracks, which she does with practiced ease. When that's done, she finds the shared office of Theresa North and Derek Paul, two of the scientists working on whatever this project is; seems to be some sort of biological weapon that A.I.M. has exciting plans for, based on the way Daisy talks. The door is locked, but it's easy enough to let herself into the paneled ceiling and crawl over to a more convenient location where she can see into the office from the tiny holes in the ceiling. She makes herself comfortable, and turns on her comm.

"This is Mockingbird; I'm in," she reports.

Daisy's voice comes on. "Excellent. Let me know when the assets show up."

"Asset" is used loosely, as these guys have no idea that they're—hopefully—providing the good guys with crucial information, but it works.

While the building is empty, Bobbi and Bucky chat over the comms. Once people show up, she needs to stay quiet. The first workers show up around six: early birds who set their own hours, cleaners, and security guards. Afterwards, it's a steady trickle of voices and footsteps until around nine, which is when North and Paul show up, ten minutes apart. Bobbi switches to text and lets the group know that their targets are on site.

There are no good opportunities. They sit at their desks, some people come in to talk to them, one gets coffee or goes to the bathroom while the other analyzes data or sends emails, they go to a meeting and take their laptops with them, and after a few hours, Bobbi gets restless. She's been trying to read over their shoulders, but the screens are too far away to make anything out.

Finally, she sends out a message to Bucky: _SOS boring myself to death_.

His voice comes over the comm link. "Need some entertainment?"

 _Pls_.

"Okay, I've got a few books here. Let me know what you want me to read to you. Uh, I have a Dark Tower book, I'm not sure which, it has a purple cover; Good Omens; Parable of the Sower, and an Archie comic book."

She muffles her laugh with her palm, then sends back, _Let's start with Good Omens_.

"Gotcha. One second. Okay, I'm ready. You ready? If you're ready, don't say anything."

She doesn't say anything.

"In the Beginning: It was a nice day," he begins.

Hours and hours later, including a lunch break where the assets take their computers with them, he's still reading.

"So Archie and Jughead are in the Lodges' living room, I guess, and Mr. Lodge says to Archie, 'You need more culture in your life!' And then Jughead says—"

She cuts him off. "They just left the room to get coffee. They're walking together. Should be passing window 32 now. Do you see them?"

"They just walked by," Bucky confirms.

"Good. I'm going in."

Their separate coffee breaks this morning were about ten minutes each, and she's really hoping they stick to that pattern. Noiselessly, she moves the ceiling panel, grabs the frame, swings down, and replaces the panel at the exact second she lets go, dropping to the floor. After shaking the dust out of her hair and assembling her disguise, she pulls the flash drives out of her pocket and checks the computer monitors—both of these guys left their computers unlocked. It baffles her sometimes how so many well-educated scientists are so ignorant about anything computer-related that they didn't learn in a classroom. Although, to be fair, they probably didn't expect that anyone was hiding in their ceiling, waiting for the opportunity.

She plugs in the flash drives and uses the specialized software to copy the contents of the hard drives over—it's faster and more efficient than copying and pasting, leaves no trail for anyone who doesn't know exactly what to look for, and best of all, it knows how to handle a situation where the drive suddenly gets pulled out of the computer and the transfer isn't complete.

"Copy is in progress," she reports to Bucky and Daisy, looking back and forth between the two computers.

"How much time?" Daisy asks. "Winter Soldier, do you have a location on the assets?"

"I see them. They're in the kitchen."

She tunes them out, focusing on the screens in front of her, and taps her fingers on her thighs, whispering, "Go go go go go."

"Mock! Paul's on his way back. Fifteen seconds until the door is in his line of sight."

"How much left to go?" Daisy asks.

"Seventy three percent here, eighty five, nine-okay, done… and done! Got it, got it, leaving!" She grabs the drives, takes a quick look around the room to make sure she didn't forget anything, and strolls leisurely to the office door. She smiles at a handful of people who make eye contact with her on her way out of the building, and walks back to the car, getting into the passenger side.

Bucky is ready to go, pulling out and driving off before she even gets her seat belt buckled. She needs a few minutes to decompress, so, after throwing the wig into the backseat, she closes her eyes and lets the first few minutes of the ride home pass in silence.

The first few minutes turns into an hour as she drifts into sleep, and the next thing she remembers, they're back in Philly, pulling into a parking spot.

"Ugh," she groans, "my mouth tastes like ass."

He pops open the glove compartment, and there's a pack of Orbit that they'd picked up that morning. "Welcome back," he says.

She yawns and takes a stick of gum out of the package. "You're a lifesaver."

They get out of the car, and Bucky says, "Actually, I saw a store a few blocks over and thought I could pick up some groceries. You don't have to come, but if you want..."

"No, I'll join you." She needs to stretch her legs anyway. Nine hours lying down in a ceiling vent makes her feel like a caged dog, especially after all the flying.

The "store" turns out to be a liquor store, and the "groceries" turns out to be beer, but she doesn't mind. She worked hard all day lying on her ass and doing nothing; she deserves some beer.

The weather is perfect as they walk back, beers in hand. Warm, but with a slight breeze that makes it enjoyable. She has the flash drives in her pocket, a payoff of an annoying but successful mission, and she's feeling a lot better than she has in quite a while.

Her mind is wandering again, when Bucky elbows her in the side and says, "Oh, so then Jughead says, 'The closest he gets to culture is when he eats yogurt!'"

It takes her a second to remember what he's talking about, but when she gets it, she snorts out loud, in very undignified way. "That's awful. Awful. Did they have Archie when you were a kid?"

"It started with all the other comics, around the beginning of the war," he says. "But I didn't read them at the time."

They're at the building now, and he reaches into his pocket for a key, then opens the door and holds it for her.

"Thanks. So when did you read your first Archie, then?"

"Would you believe me if I told you that Luke and Jessica have a whole collection? They each deny that it came from them, so either one of them is a liar or they both are."

"Ha. Or it came from Danny."

They've reached the door, and Bobbi uses her own key to unlock it and open the door. She freezes when she hears the voice of Natasha Romanova, the Black Widow, saying, "...was a bullshit deal and you know it, Johnson. You have to fix him."

Bobbi and Bucky exchange speculative glances. They walk into the apartment, and the voices go silent, as Daisy, Natasha, and her own ex-husband turn to look at them.

"Bobbi?" Clint says, the surprise evident on his face. "What are _you_ doing here?"


	3. Chapter 3

ONE WEEK EARLIER

The issue has been weighing pretty heavily on her mind recently, and she's come to a decision.

Natasha waits for the helicarrier to take off, the noise of the engine providing some noise cover in case they're being eavesdropped upon, before she turns to Jessica. "Listen," she says. "I need you to help me get Clint off the team."

"What?" Jess scrunches up her face, frowning through her mask. "How petty do you think I am?"

"What?"

"Wait, why do you want him off the team?" Jess asks.

"Because he doesn't want to be here."

Jess quirks an eyebrow. "Where did you get that from? He seems fine to me."

They're interrupted by the whizzing of a bullet just between them—Natasha drops to the ground, and Jessica attaches herself to a nearby wall, and they start to return fire.

"That's because he doesn't remember," Natasha shouts over the sounds of gunfire. They take out whoever's aiming for them, but she stays sitting on the ground, and Jess joins her behind the rock they're using for cover, and she continues, "This isn't his first stint on the team. He was with us before you joined, but when he quit, they wiped all traces of it from his mind. And the second it became convenient for S.H.I.E.L.D., they brought him back, disregarding the fact that he quit before because, well, because Hill is…let's just say she doesn't act like the Avengers would in all situations." It seems like she's being diplomatic to protect S.H.I.E.L.D., but she thinks Jess might be less sympathetic if she were to know the exact details of what turned Clint away from the Secret Avengers.

Maybe she's being uncharitable. If Jess asks, she'll tell her, she decides. She's not Hill.

Natasha turns to her and continues, "Hill acted as if she accepted his resignation, but what good is that if she makes him forget it and just signs him back up?"

"Okay, so why not just tell him?"

"And then what? He quits again, making a bigger scene this time? And joins again with a clean slate in another few weeks? And then I get my mind wiped, too? I'm trying to avoid that as much as possible these days."

Her friend tilts her head at her, and she feels like she's said too much. "Does that mean you're leaving, too?"

Natasha nods. "It's time."

"Oh." Jess looks at her sorrowfully, like they're never going to see each other again, and puts her arms around her. "Well, it was fun while it lasted."

She hugs back, realizing that this will leave Jess as the only actual Avenger on the Secret Avengers, and Natasha feels almost guilty. "Do you want to come with me?" she asks.

"No, I… I like this team, actually. It's good for me, I think." Jess peeks her head over the rock, then turns back to her. "I think the coast is clear. So what's your plan?"

They both look again, then nod at each other and stand up. Natasha says, "I'm just going to run. After the mission, assuming everything goes as planned, I'm not coming back."

"What can I do?" Jess asks.

"Just… stall," Natasha tells her.

Once she gets to New York, the first thing she does is call Nick Fury Sr. and beg for his help. Hill said she'd look for Bobbi, but Hill's worn out her credit with Natasha, all of these "hard decisions" made in the name of the "greater good." Natasha's had it with the greater good lately, sick of people missing the trees for the forest, of good people being sacrificed to prevent bad PR. It's not as if Fury has never let her down, either, but he—he gives, in addition to all that he takes, especially to the people he feels responsible for. Fury he doesn't say no to her very often.

But after all that, it turns out she doesn't need to go looking for Bobbi, because Bobbi is fine, which is something that Fury knows somehow. He won't tell her how he knows, but he knows.

Item number one, crossed off the list.

Next, she gets a car. This is harder than it sounds, since S.H.I.E.L.D. knows all of her fake identities, and she's much too proud to go to Fury with every single one of her problems. She really doesn't want to start a big Avengers versus S.H.I.E.L.D. war, either, so no high-profile Avengers. After racking her brain for people who would do her a favor, no questions asked, on the one hand, but whom S.H.I.E.L.D. would never think to associate her with, on the other, she comes up with Angela Del Toro, sometimes known as the White Tiger, and makes a phone call.

So, apparently Angela's evil now. She has _got to_ get better about staying in touch.

She considers Songbird for a second, but the fact that Melissa's been affiliated with S.H.I.E.L.D. in the past makes Natasha wary. No go.

Frustrated, she realizes that it'll have to be Matt. His ties to her are hardly a secret, but he has a healthy mistrust of authority and can keep a secret better than anyone—even if S.H.I.E.L.D. tortures him, which she doesn't really expect them to do, he'll laugh in their faces and ask for more. Sure, he's in San Francisco now, but he has his contacts.

This is how she ends up with a gold Prius rented out by one Dakota North. Dakota is professional and helpful, and she doesn't ask any questions. Natasha likes her. She even goes above and beyond by lending Natasha her driver's license—okay, they don't exactly look alike, but most people don't look past the long red hair.

She sends Hill a resignation letter in the mail, wraps it up in an envelope with a stamp and drops it off in a blue mailbox and everything. It goes a little something like this: Dear Maria, I quit, so does Hawkeye, don't call us, don't try to find us, we won't expose your secrets if you keep away, and don't even think about trying to call my bluff. XOXO, Natalia.

Then she goes to Brooklyn.

"What? What are you _talking_ about?" Clint asks. Then he apparently reconsiders, and steps to the side, waving her in. "Come inside, my neighbors can be nosy."

She steps into the apartment, and he closes the door behind her. "Who would try and erase _my_ mind? I'm no Wolverine."

"I know it sounds crazy, but you have to take my word for it," Natasha says. "Listen, do you have missing pieces lately? Like, memories of spending hours at the gym, but if I pressed you—okay, you were at the gym for five hours last Friday, right?"

"Yeah, how did you—"

"Five hours at the gym, Clint?" She raises an eyebrow. "Tell me, what exercises did you do? How much did you lift? Which area did you target? Did you listen to music? What songs? How many minutes did you spend on the treadmill? Were you sore the next day?"

Clint pinches the bridge of his nose with his index finger and thumb and shakes his head. "I don't… I don't remember." His eyes widen. "Nat, what did they…?"

"I told you. Now go pack a bag."

"I would never agree to that," Clint says for the thousandth time. They're on the I-95, in her borrowed car, windows up with the air conditioner on, no radio.

She moves into the left lane. "I'm sure that's what everyone says at first."

" _You_ would never agree to that."

"And yet, we both did."

"Why?"

"We don't remember."

"That's… that's cheating," he sputters, turning his whole body towards her and beginning to gesticulate as he talks. "How do we know we did agree to it? Maybe we refused, and they wiped our minds, and told us that we agreed?"

She keeps her voice even and avoids looking at him. "We remember agreeing, just not why. Well, _I_ remember, anyway—and when they call you in, you do, too."

"Still. Maybe they blackmailed us."

"Maybe," she says noncommittally. There was no blackmail involved, she knows that much, but she doesn't want to get into it right now.

"Where are we going?"

"Connecticut. Safe house." Really, she does want to be helpful, but she has no patience for all these questions. Although, to be fair, it's not his fault that he doesn't know anything.

"'K." He starts tapping his fingers on his thighs, then stop when she turns a glare on him. That must have given her away, because he stays silent for the rest of the trip.

She pulls up at a cabin in the woods, pulls into the garage and parks. "We can stay here as long as we need. No one knows about this place."

"You sure?" he asks, as they get out. He's talking about the Winter Soldier, of course.

"No," she admits, annoyed. She has no idea whether she would have told Barnes about this safe house. She doesn't know what their relationship was—colleagues or friends with benefits, casually dating, serious, married… could be anything. All she knows is that they had some sort of relationship before Leo Novokov, an old associate of his from his Soviet days, decided to play Jenga with her mind.

"Don't worry about it. He'd never betray you," Clint rushes to reassure her, misunderstanding the cause of her irritation.

Her instinct kicks in. "Please don't tell me about my past." She's being short with him; she hates that she's being short with him when he's just trying to help.

"Fine." He puts his hands up in the air, backing off.

They head inside. The cabin has one bedroom and a sofa bed, with a bare bones kitchen that has some food in the freezer and cans and crackers in the pantry. It's not fancy, but it'll do for a few days.

"So, here we are," Clint says. "Are we fugitives now?"

"That's ridiculous. We haven't broken any laws." They may have violated their contract with S.H.I.E.L.D., though. Except that there was no contract, just an underhanded handshake that sealed their fates.

He sighs and puts his hand on her shoulder, so that she's forced to look him in the face. "Nat, talk to me. Please. What are we doing here? What's the plan?"

She sits down on the couch and motions for him to follow. "I'm sorry. I've been completely in my head trying to plan this out. What we need to do is to find Daisy Johnson. She was—temporarily—the director of S.H.I.E.L.D., and the reason she was fired has to do with the Secret Avengers."

Clint makes a scoffing sound. "Don't call it the Secret Avengers. I was _on_ the Secret Avengers—I _led_ the Secret Avengers, and whatever you're describing… that's not it."

"Well, S.H.I.E.L.D. took the name when you stopped using it."

"Gotta love 'em. So Daisy, is she on our side?"

"Hard to say, but she's one of Fury's, so she's resourceful. And resources are what we need."

Clint nods. "Okay. How do we find her?"

Natasha hates saying it, but, "We call up Fury and beg for his help."

"You mean, _you_ call up Fury and beg for his help."

Natasha shrugs, a yes.

"Fine. I'll find something to do to keep busy. I'll go...find some crime happening outside that I can stop."

"Clint, we're in the middle of the woods."

"Haven't you ever seen a horror movie? Anyway, I've gotta get out, you know I can't be cooped up like this."

She thinks he's joking, but can't tell for sure. She's never really gotten the hang of the whole 'banter' thing. "Fine." She sighs. "Go out, save the ducks from the heroin-dealing foxes."

"Fine, I will."

He comes back ten minutes later, soaked to the bone, while she's on the phone with Fury Sr., arguing him down. "I know you know where she is, and you know perfectly well that I can cover my tracks, and, furthermore, you know exactly why I'm looking for her and why I won't stop looking, so you might as well tell me before I start making noise."

 _It's raining_ , Clint mouths, entirely unnecessarily.

She nods.

"Nick," she says into the phone, "if you ever respected me at all, you will tell me how to find her."

 _How's it going?_ Clint mouths, again.

Natasha gives him a thumbs up.

"I'll get back to you," Fury says, and disconnects. She swivels her thumb until it's pointing down.

"No dice?" Clint asks.

"We'll see. Hopefully, he'll come through. I have no other leads."

It takes two more rainy, cooped up days for Fury to get back to her with an address, but he comes through in the end, assures her that she'll find Daisy there. She resists the urge to look it up on the internet or even any more secure systems, knowing that it could get traced back to her, and if Daisy's on the run, Natasha's not going to be the reason she gets caught.

It takes all she has not to go ninety on the Wilbur Cross Parkway. It wouldn't do to get a speeding ticket under someone else's name.

"So tell me more about this S.H.I.E.L.D. Avengers team," Clint says. "Who else is on it? What do we do?"

She side-eyes him. "Secret Avengers. And you know I'm not going to do that."

" _Not_ the Secret Avengers, and you've got to give me _something_."

"All right. You won't be surprised to hear that Coulson leads the team. We tangled with A.I.M. a lot. There was recently a team overhaul—a few members left, some new ones joined. That's really all I can tell you."

"And you think that when we find Daisy, she'll undo whatever it is she did to begin with, and I'll remember the rest?"

"She'd better."

"So do we just… knock?"

"Well, we could break in."

"Not if we want to get on her good side."

"If we knock, she might bolt."

"If we break in, she might—"

The door swings open, and Daisy Johnson is standing there, wearing noise-canceling headphones and holding out her hand in warning like she's getting ready to turn their internal organs into juice. "Don't come any closer."

"We're not with S.H.I.E.L.D.," Natasha says immediately. She makes sure to enunciate, so that Daisy can read her lips.

"Please, like I'm going to fall for—"

She interrupts. "I'm sure you heard what Hill did right after she kicked you out. Do you think this one," she jerks her shoulder in Clint's direction, "is going to go and do her dirty work after that?"

Daisy pauses, almost lets down her guard. Then she looks at Clint's face, and something in it must give it away, because she raises her arms again, and says, "He doesn't remember. _Don't_ play with me."

"I'm _not_. We're here for your help."

"Why should I believe you?"

"Because I _do_ remember."

Daisy snorts. "What's it to you? You're S.H.I.E.L.D."

Natasha crosses her arms. "And what does that make you?"

"Will you two stop this already?" Clint bursts out. "Daisy, come on. I'm not S.H.I.E.L.D. I'm an Avenger, and I'm certainly no assassin. Will you please let us in?"

Finally, Daisy relents. She pulls them both inside and locks the door behind them, then walks over to a coffee table a few feet away and sets the headphones down.

Clint takes a seat without being invited to do so, and puts his feet on the coffee table. "I really wish someone would fill me in on all these context clues that I'm missing."

"Well, that's why we're here," Natasha says. "So she can give you your memories back."

"Hold on a second. Who says that 'she' has the ability to give him his memories back?" Daisy retorts, shoving at Clint's legs so that he's forced to put his feet down.

Natasha's not in the mood. "Don't play helpless with me. If you didn't have a fix for this, you'd be a vegetable yourself right now. And you owe us this. It was a bullshit deal and you know it, Johnson. You have to fix him."

She hears the front door opening, and the conversation stops immediately, as Bobbi herself enters the apartment, followed by Bucky Barnes.

"Bobbi?" Clint says. "What are _you_ doing here?"


	4. Chapter 4

Natasha isn't surprised to see Bobbi, especially given the size of the apartment, which is much too big for just one person on the run. Fury did assure her that Mockingbird was safe, and in Fury's mind, "safe" means "under his personal protection." She would never have expected Barnes, though, so in the end, she's caught unaware just as much as Clint is.

"What am I _doing here_?" Bobbi repeats, almost incredulously. She slams the door shut and walks determinedly over to them, sticking a finger in his face. "It's good to see you, too, asshole, how about—"

The last thing they need is a superhero showdown, so Natasha interrupts before things can go any further. "Wait. Stop, okay? Let's start from the beginning. The reason that we are in your apartment is because Clint has some memory issues, and we think that Daisy can help him." She doesn't emphasize the words _memory issues_ , but she trusts Bobbi to get the hint.

Bobbi narrows her eyes, and Natasha gives her a meaningful look. Bobbi tilts her head, and Natasha answers by raising an eyebrow and nodding. Finally, Bobbi casually brings her hand down to her side, dusts it off on her pants, and says, "Right. Who wants a beer?"

The tension is broken, and they sit around the couches and pass around the bottles while Clint starts to explain. "So we're in this strange secret S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Avengers' group that answers to Maria Hill, and they wipe our minds after every mission, and Nat wanted out. Um, I'm kind of in between missions right now, and she's AWOL, I guess—"

"Resigned, both of us," Natasha corrects.

"Resigned, but I—can you actually resign on someone else's behalf? I'm not sure that counts. Anyway, because I _was_ in between missions, I don't actually remember any of this stuff, and Nat thinks that Daisy can help bring back my memories, because of her S.H.I.E.L.D. history, so here we are."

Natasha can feel the three of them examining her face as Clint speaks, trying to figure out how much she actually knows and what her full motivations are. It's no problem for her to keep her expression impassive, but she knows she won't be able to hang on to her secrets for too long, not with this crowd.

Natasha continues, "I sent in a letter of resignation on both of our behalfs after I got out of there, and I'm hoping that Hill is reasonable enough not to go after me, but we all know she's not exactly the trusting sort."

"Why go through all this trouble?" Barnes asks. "Why not just walk out the front door?"

She doesn't want to reveal the real reason, not until Clint remembers it himself, so she gives a partial answer. "She'd wipe our minds on the way out, and I'm not okay with that anymore. The things that we did as Secret Avengers are part of what makes us the people we are, but when they erase our memories of those things, they're reducing us to tools. It's not right."

"And yet, you agreed to it," he retorts, folding his arms.

She meets his stare head-on without answering. Finally, she turns to Daisy. "I know that you can help us. Will you?"

"I'm glad you have so much confidence in me, but... I'm still not sure it's that easy. I have to reach out and talk to some people—discreetly, of course—to see what can be done. In the meantime, should we make up two more beds?"

Bobbi speaks up. "We've got that extra bedroom—oh, that smug bastard; he changed our safe house because he knew the two of you were coming, didn't he?"

"Looks like it," Daisy says.

"Well, Nat can have the bedroom," Clint offers. "I'll take the couch."

"I've got room for two," Bobbi says. Everyone looks at her, and she clarifies, "I mean that Natasha can stay with me." Clint looks amused, and Bobbi's cheeks are pink. "Oh, shut up," she snaps at him. Then, to Natasha, "If you don't mind. There's a daybed."

"That's fine."

"Great. Oh! Daisy. Um, here you go." She fishes into her pocket and pulls out what looks like two thumb drives, handing them to Daisy.

"Good work," Daisy says. "I'll go see what I can do with it now, if everyone is good out here. Romanoff, Barton, we'll continue this conversation in the morning." It's an order, not a request, and while Daisy isn't in the position to give orders to anyone right now, it's progress, so Natasha accepts it. Daisy grabs two bottles of beer and heads towards the hallway.

"You're not old enough to drink those!" Clint calls after her.

"Drinking age is eighteen in Attilan," Daisy shoots back, heading into the bedroom across the hall and shutting the door behind her.

"I thought she was a mutant," Bobbi says, once she's gone.

Clint draws his eyebrows together. "What _is_ the drinking age in Attilan?"

Tabling the drinking age in Attilan (and its relevance for Level Ten S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives on U.S. soil) for the time being, Bobbi says, "Let's get you guys set up before we forget." She leads them to the her bedroom, and opens a closet full of linens. She pulls out one set of sheets and a pillow for Natasha and hands it to her. Then she gets a second set. "Follow me," she says to Clint.

She shows him across the hall to his room, dropping the pile on the desk next to his bed and looks the room over. It's a little smaller than the other ones, like it's an afterthought compared with the rest of the place. "I haven't actually been in here yet. Thought we wouldn't need it." She starts making the bed without thinking about it.

"Hey, I can do that," he says, putting his beer down on the desk next to the bed and taking the sheet from her, their arms brushing.

"Oh, yeah." She hands it over. "Force of habit."

He smirks, a _knowing_ sparkle in his blue eyes. "Your habit when you have me alone in a bedroom is to make the bed?"

She's suddenly very aware of their proximity, as the fine hairs on her upper arms stand on end. She doubles down and leans in even closer, putting her lips up to his ear and whispering, "What can I say, Barton? I get real close to you and _all_ I can think about is falling asleep."

He holds up a finger and wags it at her. "You watch yourself."

She winks. "I'll be sure to do that." She leaves him setting up the bedspread and goes back into her room. Natasha is making her own bed, so Bobbi heads out to the balcony, where she saw Bucky disappear to a few minutes ago, and slides the door shut behind her.

She finds him leaning against the building's outer wall and looking out at the view—which isn't much to write home about, just a bunch of buildings across the street, but there's more sky above the buildings than in New York, which makes it look nicer.

"You're never going to win her back by moping in the corner, sport."

"Who said anything about winning her back?" he says, without looking at her.

"I did, just now. Didn't you hear me?"

He doesn't answer right away, but when he does, he sounds morose. "Look at me, I'm a monster. I couldn't win back a yo-yo."

"A yo-yo?"

"Yeah, because they…" Bucky flicks his wrist, simulating a yo-yo dropping and bouncing back.

She positively cackles. "Oh my God. That's so awful it's amazing. But honestly, you're blind if you think that you couldn't get anyone you wanted. ' _Look at me_.' You're funny. A funny heartthrob. If I weren't such a mess myself, and you weren't in love with someone else, I'd go for it."

"Really."

"You're joking, right?" It's inconceivable to her that a man so gorgeous can be so unaware of it. Being kept on ice all those years might have had something to do with it, and then the whole famed-assassin long-term girlfriend thing might have kept some of the flirting at bay, but surely he's had some exposure to… she doesn't know, _mirrors_ , or something.

He looks unconvinced. "I have a _metal arm_."

"If you don't know yet that's a turn on, I don't know what to tell you."

He blushes as his gaze flickers over, just for a second, to the bedroom, where Natasha is finishing up her sheets, which somehow puts her mind at ease.

She sees through the sliding door that Clint has finished up his own room, and is now sitting on her bed. They're talking, which makes her kind of wish she'd left her own listening devices around. She turns back to Bucky.

"Now, repeat after me: 'I, Bucky Barnes, am a freaking catch.'"

"You think this is going to work out?" Clint asks.

She's determined that it will. "Daisy's got something, we just need to convince her to share."

He nods. "Hope so. Hey, what do you think their deal is?" He tilts his head in the direction of the glass door, where they can see Bobbi and Barnes chatting.

It makes sense to her, though she can't say it out loud to Clint, that Bobbi would have met up with Daisy after escaping A.I.M., but she hasn't yet figured out what Barnes's connection is. "Bobbi and Daisy are both loyal to Fury, so I'm betting he has something to do with their working together. As far as Barnes goes, your guess is probably better than mine."

He's still watching them, and she realizes that she may have originally understood the question the wrong way. There's a tightness around his eyes, like he wants to go over and interrupt, but he's holding himself back, because… well, she can't really explain why he's holding himself back. On the other side of the door, Bobbi's body language says that she can feel his eyes on her but is pretending not to notice. Then Bobbi says something that makes Barnes laugh, and Clint grips the bottle in his hand so hard his knuckles turn white.

Natasha likes Bobbi and Clint on both a personal and a professional level, but the unsettled nature of the relationship between those two is starting to get on her nerves. It's not good for either of them to be in this in-between place, not good for anyone to be in this kind of limbo. She knows a thing or two about exes you still love, but it's different with her and Matt, although it took them both a long time to accept it.

What's curious is her own lack of feeling about the scene in front of her. In theory, she should have some sort of reaction—some sort of territorial jealousy, but it's not there. Objectively, Bucky Barnes is a very handsome man, and she enjoys his company, but… nothing. It's very strange, how thoroughly this supposed romance has been scooped out of her.

"I should probably mention, she knows that there was something between you," Bobbi says.

Something in his eyes transforms instantly, snapping him out of his rut. "She _remembers_?"

"No," she hastily corrects, "sorry, I didn't mean to—she just kind of figured it out from context. She won't let us tell her any details, though, because she doesn't want to know her history through other people's eyes."

"Well. That's Natasha for you."

"I'm just saying, it wouldn't come out of left field if you made a move," she says.

He sighs. "It wouldn't be fair, not with everything so off-balance. Unless she knew the whole story, I couldn't."

"So, you're joining a monastery, is that it?"

"Hey, this is a fun conversation. I'm having fun." Bucky makes a face that says he is not having fun. "Anyway, what about you and _your_ ex over there?"

"Ha." She gives him a wry smile. "You see, Bucky Barnes, there are two types of exes: there's the type where one half of the couple gets brainwashed into forgetting the other's existence... and then, you know, there's the other type. Where the words 'I don't think we should be together' were actually uttered."

He clicks his tongue sympathetically. "I guess it wasn't mutual?"

"I don't know," she says, "it was and it wasn't. At the time, I thought it was just going to be… you weren't around back then, but when our marriage fell apart the first time, there was a lot of on and off and off and on again. He was my 'estranged husband,' I was his 'estranged wife.' But now it's different—now we're exes, in the eyes of the state. And that's it. I have my own life, and he has his. We're still… we're still _something_ , I guess, but a platonic something."

"So you're not interested."

"This is a fun conversation," she quotes at him. And then, just to torture herself—and him—a little more, she adds, "Hey, so maybe the two of them will hook up. Wouldn't that be wild?"

"Yeah. Wild."

"Hey, chin up," Bobbi says. "At least we have our health!"

"To our health." He holds up his beer.

"Cheers." She clinks it.

At that point, the door slides open, and the other two come out.

"Stop talking about us," Natasha says dryly as they approach.

"But then what would we talk about?" Bobbi quips back. "Welcome to the deck. We're just enjoying the twilight out here. How are the two of you finding your accommodations?"

"Never better," Clint says. "I think Fury's finally found his calling."

She grins. "Nick Fury, Agent of A.I.R.B.N.B.?"

Bucky raises his bottle, again. "I'll drink to that."

They spend hours outside getting pleasantly buzzed and looking out at the city lights, before heading to their rooms. After showering and getting ready for bed, Natasha gets comfortable under a fluffy blanket (Fury really does have an unexpected talent for this) and prepares to sink into sleep. She's halfway there when Bobbi pipes up.

"So, I have to ask."

God, the two of them with their questions. When they were married, they must have talked each other to death.

"If you're technically on a mission, you remember everything, don't you?" Bobbi asks.

Okay, fair, this is a deserved question. Natasha sits up, forcing herself awake. "Yes," Natasha says. "And I—well, Fury told me you'd made it out, but I'm glad to see you with my own two eyes. Are you okay? You were a little… wonky, last time I saw you."

"I'm recovering. I've been doing these mind exercises, and they seem to be helping. Either that, or the placebo effect is helping, but whatever gets results, right?"

They're quiet for a few more minutes, until Bobbi speaks up again, her voice floating over in the darkness, sounding more hesitant this time. "Why did you wait until Clint was off assignment to leave? Did you… did he want to stay?"

"Not exactly," Natasha says. She's so used to keeping secrets for secrets' sake, but in this instance, there's no reason for her not to tell Bobbi the whole truth, so that's what she does. "Actually, he quit the team after your last mission, and they erased the whole Secret Avengers experience from his memory entirely. Later on, he was with me when the next emergency came up, so Hill just added him back to the roster. Even when he's on, he doesn't remember."

Bobbi huffs. "Well, that's rich."

Natasha takes the opportunity to ask a question of her own. "How did you and Daisy join up with Barnes? What's his part in all this?"

"Honestly, I don't know. They met up before I escaped. I think Daisy had the idea to keep tabs on S.H.I.E.L.D. and wanted someone she knew she could trust, and she picked him because—well, you know."

Because he would never betray her, like Clint said. Okay, time to stop asking questions. "Never mind, I shouldn't have asked."

"It's okay. You can."

"I just—"

"Don't want to be influenced by other people's perspectives of your missing memories, I know. 'Night, Nat."

Natasha wakes up early on purpose and finds Daisy in the kitchen, pouring Cheerios into a bowl. She turns around as Natasha approaches. "Good morning."

"Good morning."

Daisy opens up a cabinet with bowls, and Natasha takes one. She takes some cereal for herself, and gets milk from the fridge. Daisy gets two spoons out of a drawer, and they both sit down at the table to eat.

And to talk business, if Natasha has anything to say about it.

"So, talk to me," she says.

"Wouldn't you prefer to wait until Barton is up, so that I can talk to you both at the same time?"

"Actually, no." Natasha jumps right in. "How do you reverse the memory loss?"

"It's not that simple."

" _Daisy_." She's starting to lose patience.

Daisy holds up a hand. "I didn't say it can't be done. I actually know exactly how it can be done. See, Stark has this old lab with a whole bunch of brain toys, which happens to be where the nanobots used by S.H.I.E.L.D. to erase our memories were originally developed. He also has the first prototype, which is this big machine that basically does the same thing, wiping down memories. Since the technology was intended to cut out parts of your mind in case you were captured and tortured, the original intention was to put everything back afterwards, and the same machine has an 'unlock' function. Theoretically, it should work on Barton."

Natasha nods, waiting for the _but_.

"The problem is this: The nanobots—and this wasn't part of the original design—transmit a signal, and when they see that they're being tampered with, it sends an alert to S.H.I.E.L.D., which I didn't know about until I tried it on myself. They're able to, I don't know, forcibly change the state of the nanobots or something which will crash the process. I took them by surprise when I did it to myself, so I managed to recover enough, but they've probably automated it by now."

"Wow." Natasha shakes her head. "I don't know whether to be disgusted or impressed."

"Tell me about it."

Natasha stands up, puts her bowl and dishes in the sink, and turns around, thinking. The puzzle pieces fit perfectly together, if only she can convince its creator to use them. "I actually have an idea about how to get around that. I just need to go out for a bit to take care of it."

"Really? That would be extraordinarily convenient."

"Just do me a favor and don't mention this to anyone else until I get back. I'll tell you when I know for sure."

She walks out to the living room, puts on her boots, grabs her borrowed car keys from the shelf next to the door, and gives the room one last look over.

"Romanoff," Daisy says, as Natasha turns towards the door.

"Yeah."

"I argued for you not to get the memory implants, if it makes a difference. I was... overruled."

"Hill didn't trust me, eh?"

Daisy doesn't answer.

Natasha opens the door and flips her head around, not bothering to hide her grin. "In her defense… she was right."

When Bobbi leaves the bedroom the next morning, the first thing she notices is the dartboard set up on the wall right next to the door. It's the same one from his apartment, the same exact style that he replaces every few months. He changes his costume style more often than he changes his dartboard model. She touches the fiber, gets lost in the pattern of the holes for a few seconds. He's going to need to replace this one soon.

The door opens, and she drops her hand to her side, as Clint walks out of his bedroom in a T-shirt and boxer briefs. His hair is matted, and his eyes half-closed. "'Morning," he grunts.

"Hey," she says in response.

"Bathroom."

She holds out her arm for him to pass, and watches as he walks down the hall. He looks good from the back; that's never stopped being true.

In the kitchen, Daisy is leaning over in front of her laptop, which she closes as Bobbi walks up.

"Hey," Bobbi greets her. "Where's Natasha?"

"She's out doing her own thing," Daisy answers. "Seems like she'll be gone all day. Bucky's up, too; working out in his room, I think. I want to talk to Clint about the memory retrieval, and you should probably be here for it."

Bobbi shrugs and takes a breakfast bar from the box on the counter. "Got nowhere else to go."

Ten minutes later, Clint emerges from the bathroom, showered and dressed. He walks right by them and leans over the coffeepot, inhaling deeply.

"Cups?" he asks.

Daisy points to the cupboard behind him. He opens the cabinet, takes out a plain white mug, and pours himself some coffee, which he then swallows in one gulp. "Okay, I'm up. What's up, fellow outlaws?" he says cheerfully as he pours himself a second cup.

"Daisy wants to tell you her plan for your brain," Bobbi says.

"Put it in a jar and prod it?"

"Nah, that's my specialty. She's more likely to replace it with a few pieces of silicon."

Daisy rolls her eyes, and Clint elbows Bobbi. "Shhh, no talking, we'll get detention."

They gather round the table, and Daisy starts to explain, mostly talking to Clint. "Here's the story. When new recruits sign on to the Secret Avengers, they're infected, so to speak, with nanobots that give a select few people the power to alter and erase their memories using a trigger word. Some of the memories are restored when you get called in, but only the ones that S.H.I.E.L.D. considers necessary for you to function as an agent. You with me so far?"

Clint nods.

"Good. Now what does this mean for us? It means that the memories _can_ be unlocked. If you have the encryption key. Which we do, because the nanobots are based on technology developed by Tony Stark, and we have access to some earlier versions of the same technology."

"Earlier versions?" Clint repeats. "Like… a first draft?"

"More like a fully-functional first release without the extra features."

"How exactly do we have access to this?" asks Bobbi. "Is Iron Man going to unlock the door for us?"

"I don't want to involve Stark directly in this. He wouldn't be happy if he knew what S.H.I.E.L.D.'s done with his work, and it would look bad for him to publicly oppose them. Also, I don't really like him."

Clint lets out a burst of surprised laughter.

"But I do have a way in. I'm waiting for a few answers, but as soon as I hear back from them, and as soon as you're ready, we'll go."

"Okay." He takes a deep breath. "This is all a little overwhelming. I have—I have _no idea_ what to expect."

Bobbi speaks up. "You know, I also had my memories tampered with recently. Getting them back can be...disorienting, to say the least. And you might not be happy with what you find out."

"What do you mean, you had your memories tampered with?" Clint sits up straight and turns to her, looking alarmed. "Who tampered with your memories?"

"That's not the point." He gives her a look, and she gives in. "Okay, okay, it was A.I.M. Remember when we worked together on that W.C.A. mission, and Rappaccini dropped a building on your head and then tried to get me to join up? So, they don't like taking no for an answer. I'm okay now, but my point is that you need to prepare yourself for finding out some potentially upsetting things."

"What potentially upsetting things?"

"Well," Bobbi says, "there must have been a reason why S.H.I.E.L.D. erased your memories—not that I'm defending it. It's gotta be something heavy."

Clint shakes his head. "A.I.M. and S.H.I.E.L.D., using the same techniques… whoever would have seen that coming, huh?"

They both turn to Daisy, who frowns. "I'm sorry, I really am. It was a bad idea and I never should have gone along with it."

"Gone along with it!" Clint exclaims. "You were the _director_."

"And Hill was more experienced. I thought she knew what she was doing."

"Oh, she knew," Bobbi mutters.

Clint gives her a strange look.

"I mean—"

"What you mean is, there's something in my missing memories that everyone knows and no one is telling me. And it has to do with you."

She doesn't want to _lie_ to him. "Well, you know what Natasha says about other people's lost memories."

"Don't tell me you're on _her_ side," he says, looking put out.

"I'm—" She blinks, and all of a sudden it hits her, the weight of what they're keeping from him. It's been so easy and fun since he and Natasha showed up, just hanging out with old friends and not worrying about anything except for who has a stupid crush on whom, and that's all going to change once he _knows_. Oh, it's going to be awkward and horrible, and she's starting to have second thoughts.

Daisy gives her a concerned look, then says to Clint, "Don't worry too much about it. Whatever memories get dragged up, the important thing is that they're all in the past." She pauses, then says, "You don't have to go through with this. I know that Agent Romanoff went through a lot of trouble to go under the radar, but that was her choice and this is a decision that you have to make for yourself. If you want to take the blue pill, that's perfectly fine."

He swallows, glances at Bobbi, and then turns back to Daisy with a resolute look on his face. "No, I do," he says. "I want to recover my memories. Whatever it brings."

It takes a bit of finagling to get an appointment for today, with his busy schedule all over the world, but fortunately it turns out that Tony Stark will be in New York this afternoon. The A.I. version of him she books the meeting with agrees to keep it all under wraps, but hanging out at Stark Tower, disguise or no disguise, is a bad idea, so Natasha hops on a train uptown and wanders around the park for a few hours until it's time for the meeting.

Tony's already there by the time she arrives, which is a nice touch. He pours two glasses of water at a side table and hands her one, which she thanks him for and then puts down. She's not here for water.

She explains what she needs, without giving any details of who it's for or why it's necessary, finishing up with, "I haven't told anyone, just like I promised, but you know I wouldn't be asking you for this if it weren't important."

He starts pacing back and forth. "Natasha. Please don't put me in the position of having to say no to you."

"Don't say no," she says, standing up and leaning against his desk. "Don't say no. You have the technology to solve this problem. Why hold back?"

"It still has some holes, some use cases that aren't handled—"

"What, like some one-in-a-million situation—"

"One in a million is still one, Natasha, and once I put it out there, it's out there. Which means it can be hacked, reverse-engineered, circumnavigated, and then we're back to square one on this."

She walks up to him and gets in his way, forcing him to stand still. "So you'll improve upon it. Tony, this doesn't sound like you at all. Where's Mr. Futurist? Of _course_ someone will find flaws eventually. Of course someone will develop some other mind control device that this doesn't catch. It's inevitable. And then you'll make yours better, and they'll make theirs better—but what else are you going to do? It's not right to hoard this, when your friends need it."

Tony puts his head in his hands, and that's when she knows she's got him. "You didn't even tell me who it was who needs it," he complains.

"I'm a spy; I keep secrets. It's what I do."

"It's a lot to ask, Romanova."

" _Trust_ me, Stark."

He sighs. "I'll… _ugh_. Fine. How many doses did you say you needed?"

"How many can you give me?"

Tony rubs his temple. "Natasha…"

She decides to have pity on him. "Four. I'll take four."

"I really hope I don't regret this." He looks at a clock on the wall and starts talking to himself. "Okay, so I have to be in San Francisco at five, then I have a thing in Tokyo, then… maybe on the way back?" He glances at her. "Want to go world-hopping with me? Or do you have plans?"

"Wouldn't want to slow you down," Natasha says. "Plus, I can't be recognized."

"So you'll wait here?" Tony suggests. "I'll section off an empty wing for you or something, set you up with a computer, anything you need. It'll be a while."

"You promise this isn't a trap? You're not just keeping me in one place so that they can find me?"

"That hurts. That gets me right here." He taps on his chest. "Come on. I don't even know who 'they' are."

He shows her to one of the residential areas, a nice suite with a stocked fridge, probably used to house visiting businesses contacts, and sets her up with a computer, as promised. "I turned off the cameras on the way. Don't bring down the company while you're here, okay?"

"I love that we have so much trust in each other," Natasha says.

"Good, I'm going to hold you to that."

She falls asleep waiting. It's late when he gets back, so late that she considers staying there the night, but time is of the essence. Tony hands over the briefcase with a pained look on his face. She's afraid she's going to have to pry it out of his hands, but he lets it go and gives her instructions on how to use what's inside.

"Thank you so much for this," she says, as she's leaving. "I owe you one."

"Don't be silly. I wish I could do more. Natasha, who are you running from?"

She laughs and shakes her head. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."


	5. Chapter 5

The sun is already up when Natasha wakes up to the sound of Bobbi showering on the other side of the wall. After getting back to a dark and silent apartment well past two in the morning, she'd woken Clint (she considered giving him the injection in his sleep, but she's really trying to move away from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s tactics) and given him half an explanation and a full dose of treatment. Crawling into bed afterwards had felt so good, and she really doesn't want to get up now, but she's generally unable to sleep when others nearby are awake.

She gets into the shower after Bobbi finishes up, and she sets the tap to cold, hoping it'll give her the energy she needs to make up for the missing hours of sleep. The crisp water is vicious but bitingly effective, and she's definitely awake by the time she turns the water off and wraps herself in her towel. After catching her breath and patting herself dry, she dries her hair with the towel, gets dressed, hangs up the towel, and goes out to see who else is up.

The television is on in the living room, playing a cartoon, with the group sitting around it. Daisy's perched on the arm of one of the couches with a bowl of cereal, while Bobbi does some sort of plank routine on the rug. Barnes is reading a book on the same couch as Daisy, occasionally glancing up at the screen. As Natasha passes by, Daisy puts a hand on her wrist to get her attention, and they walk together to the kitchen, out of hearing range of the others.

"How was your trip yesterday?" Daisy asks her in a low voice, keeping an eye on the other room to make sure no one is looking at them.

"Successful," Natasha answers.

"I'm going to need a little bit more than that."

"I got ahold of a certain tech that will make sure the nanobots in Clint's brain will no longer send an alert to S.H.I.E.L.D. when they're tampered with."

"Some kind of scrambler?"

"Something like that."

"Where did you—"

"Can't tell you that," Natasha says, cutting her off.

"Is it stolen?"

"As a matter of fact, it was obtained with permission from its previous owner."

Daisy raises her eyebrows. "That's a new tactic for you."

She doesn't bother to dignify the slight with a response.

"Sorry," Daisy says after a beat. "I'm grateful, really. One concern, though: is it possible that this tech will interfere with the process of decrypting the memories?"

She'd had the same question herself, but once she knew what she was dealing with, it was pretty easy to get Tony talking about how all his inventions fit together, and he alleviated her concerns without even knowing he was doing it. "It shouldn't be a problem; it's pretty nonintrusive." The second part of that sentence is a lie, but the first part is true, anyway.

"Excellent. I guess we're good to go."

Daisy holds off on the group announcement until Clint gets up, and then lets everyone know that they'll be breaking into Tony's secret lab the next day.

"My favorite thing in the world to do," Clint says.

Bucky laughs. "You and me both."

Daisy's been locked in her room for hours, working on the files they brought back the other day, and when she comes out for a bathroom break, Bobbi takes advantage. She waits right outside the bathroom, and then ambushes Daisy as she walks out.

"What's up, boss?"

Daisy keeps walking, but she leaves the bedroom door open so that Bobbi can follow her in. She sits down on the bed, and pulls over a keyboard on a wheeled table. "What's up, free agent?"

Bobbi looks around and marvels at how the place has been transformed into an office. There are three monitors set up on two different surfaces, a laptop plugged into a docking station, and a stack of drives on the desk, plus a legal pad filled with scribbles on the bed next to her.

"How's work going?" she asks.

Daisy sits down and logs back into her computer. "Slow. Everything's got like who knows how many layers of security, and I have to be very careful to make sure I don't trip anything up which would garble all the files."

"You have a backup, though."

"Of course. I've already needed to use it a few times. It's just a hassle."

"Anything I can help with?"

"Eh." Daisy dismisses her with a wave. "I'm sure I'll need your sick biochemistry skills once I make these files readable, but until then, if you could keep the caffeine coming…"

"Sure thing."

She moves out to the kitchen and checks on the coffee pot, which is just about empty, so she pours it out, then switches out the filter for a clean one and pours the beans into the machine. When everything is ready, she presses the start button, and the whirring of the grinding beans brings Clint into the room like a Pavlovian dog. She's not even sure where he came from.

"What's this project Daisy's working on?" he asks.

"That's the question," Bobbi says. She explains the story to him, telling him about the trip she and Bucky took the other day to recover the files.

Clint scrunches up his nose. "I could never do that. I hate reconnaissance."

"It's even better when you're jetlagged." He gives her a confused look, so she adds, "We kind of took an impromptu vacation in Hawaii after… after we all met up. Just got back a few days ago."

"You don't say. We always talked about going to Hawaii someday. For real." They _had_ talked about that, once upon a time. He was there once with the Avengers, she knows. It was before they'd met, but things were tense, and they didn't exactly get a chance to sightsee at the time.

"It was really cool. The nature out there is incredible. The trees, and the water, and the _mountains_. You should definitely go."

They slip into silence, which is then interrupted as the coffee begins to drip into the pot.

"Now that I have one less gig in my life, maybe it'll free up time for vacations," Clint says. "I'd thought I turned into some sort of douche-y gym rat. The kind who has a really strong opinion about which is better, deadlifts or squats."

"And which camp did you think you were in? Keep in mind that if you say deadlift, I want another divorce."

He laughs. "Unfair! I'm an archer; I need the upper body strength."

"All right, fine, you're off the hook for this one."

The machine stops dripping, and Clint reaches for the coffee cups, but Bobbi takes the entire pot and heads for the door. "It's for the director."

"C'mon, Morse, just one cup," he says, holding it out. "Help a guy out. I'll switch my answer to squats, whatever you want."

"Ha." She relents and fills up his cup three-quarters of the way. "You always know exactly how to hook me."

"It's my superpower."

"Yeah, yeah. I'd better get out of here before I end up surrendering the rest of this."

The five of them spar in the park later in the afternoon, and then they go out for a last hurrah, to a trendy bar/restaurant in Fishtown with live music. They decide to sit outside, so as not to overwhelm Clint's ears with the music, so they push a few tables together and get cozy. Daisy "Drinking Age In Attilan Is Eighteen" Johnson has a few pretty authentic-looking fake driver's licenses to choose from, so they order drinks with their meal. The music drifts out through the open windows, but not loudly enough to interfere with the conversation.

Clint polishes off three drinks before Daisy cuts him off and hands him a glass of water. "You don't want to go into tomorrow with a hangover," she warns. At this point, he's not far enough gone so that he'll be in bad shape tomorrow, but he has even less of a filter than usual, and a group of friends who pass their table on their way down the street, arguing passionately about which Arctic Monkeys album was better than which other Arctic Monkeys album, sets him off on a rant of his own.

"What's so amazing about that, is, look at them, they clearly disagree, it's very important to them, but they're just talking. Why can't we do that? Why do we always have to _hit_ each other all the time?" No one answers, so he keeps going. "And I do it too, which sucks. I suck. Buck, remember when you were—when you were Cap, and I showed up at your place and I fought you because I thought you were trying to replace him? Why didn't I just _talk_ to you, tell you how I was feeling? Or you, Nat, when you were living with Daredevil in San Francisco, and I came out there and—"

Natasha groans. "The less said about _that_ , the better."

"The more said, the better!" Bobbi objects, perking up. She's never heard this story. "What did he do?"

"He tried to fight Daredevil to win me back."

Bobbi turns to Clint in fake jealousy. "You dueled for her hand? You never dueled for _my_ hand."

"I'll do it right now!" Clint exclaims, placing his hands on the edge of the table as if he's about to stand up. "Just point me at the dastardly knave, and I'll destroy him."

"If that's some sort of sly jab about my lack of a dating life, I'll have you know—"

"Really? Your dating life is lacking?" His nose wrinkles.

"A temporary dry spell, that's all." To be truthful, she hasn't dated anyone since they broke up, but she's certainly not about to admit that in front of the whole group.

Clint scoffs. "They should be lining up around the block for you. Idiots."

She makes eye contact with Bucky, gives him a look like, _See what I mean?_ Clint is upset that she's not dating other guys: _Platonic_. Bucky's covering his mouth with the back of his hand, but she's pretty sure that he's laughing behind it. Jerk.

"What about that S.H.I.E.L.D. guy?" Daisy asks.

That gets her attention. "What S.H.I.E.L.D. guy?"

"I thought there was a guy at S.H.I.E.L.D. that you had a thing with."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Bobbi says. "There's no S.H.I.E.L.D. guy."

"Okay. I must have gotten confused. Maybe it was someone else."

"My point is," Clint cuts in, "my point is, why does violence always need to be a first resort? Regular people don't get into fistfights every time they disagree on something, and we're supposed to be heroes!"

"Say that a little louder," Daisy mutters, looking around to see if anyone nearby heard him.

The sarcasm is lost on him, and he continues, "What kind of role models are we?" He turns to Bucky. "I'm so sorry I hit you, man. You were a great Cap. You were perfect."

"Thanks," Bucky says, clearly trying very hard to keep a straight face.

"Who wants dessert?" Natasha asks.

"I think I should see a therapist," Clint says.

They take both cars to the meeting point, just in case something goes south. Bobbi and Bucky go in Daisy's car, and Natasha and Clint follow them, so that both groups arrive at the same time. When they get there, Daisy's contact is there to meet them. She recognizes him, although she's not sure they've ever been formally introduced.

The guy sticks out his hand as they get out of the car. "Eden Fesi. Manifold. I was never here."

She laughs as she shakes his hand. "Bobbi Morse. Mockingbird. Likewise."

"And you're Bucky, of course."

"Nice to meet you." Bucky nods.

The doors of the second car open up, and Natasha and Clint get out.

"Manifold?" Clint says. "You're our secret ticket in?"

"They love using me for my powers," Eden responds. "Hey, Hawkeye, Widow."

It clicks for her that the two of them are on the Avengers with him, while she's mostly been out of the loop with that crowd, ever since Luke's Avengers disbanded...for the first time since returning to Earth. She had S.H.I.E.L.D., and she's always told herself she was more of an agent than the Avenger, but it hasn't stopped her from putting on a costume every day instead of the same black jumpsuit and insignia as the rest of her colleagues. All of a sudden, she has an urge to call Jessica and find out what she and Luke and the baby have been up to.

"I don't see any secret lab," Natasha says.

"Well, no, I wasn't going to give you an address," Eden says. "I'm not that bad."

"How far can you teleport?" Bucky asks.

"Far enough. Everyone ready?"

A few flashes of light later, they're inside a building. They've arrived in a hallway which leads to a huge main room, with lots of glass partitions and different types of gadgets in each sectioned-off area. All the way in the back seems to be some sort of server room, and the rest is full of workstations and tables with tools and half-finished prototypes lying around.

They follow Daisy over to a chair with lots of wires and screens and gizmos surrounding it. "Here we are," Daisy says. "Ready, Hawkeye?"

"This isn't going to be like last time, is it?" Eden says, without elaborating.

"Nope. We've found a way to override that little problem."

"Glad to hear it."

Clint steps up to the chair and runs his fingers over the headrest. "This thing hurt?"

"Not at all," Daisy answers. "You'll feel a little disoriented afterwards, but that should be it as far as side effects."

He takes a deep breath, then sits in the chair. They all crowd around, and then he looks at Bobbi and opens his mouth like he has something to say. He doesn't, though, only stretches his arm out at her, palm up, and she puts her hand in his.

Daisy straps him in, then fiddles with a device behind his head, and locks his head into place. She moves over to a bunch of screens nearby.

"So, this is it, huh?" Clint says. "Can't wait to find out who killed Kennedy."

"I thought that was Bucky," Bobbi jokes weakly, drawing a weak laughter from the room.

Bucky crosses his arms and leans back against the wall. "I guess you're all laughing because you think that's a joke."

"Count backwards from ten, please," Daisy says.

"Ten," Clint says. He squeezes Bobbi's hand. "Nine. Eight. Se….ven…. Sssss..."

He's out, his hand limp. Bobbi squeezes it herself for a second, then crosses it over her body. She looks up at the projection in front of them, which shows that a process called Backup is at 2%. "How long is this going to take?" she asks.

Daisy looks at Eden. "Somewhere between forty minutes to an hour, I'd guess."

"Do we need to be quiet?" Bucky asks.

Daisy shakes her head. "His brain is, uh, in read-only mode."

Bobbi looks at Clint's unconscious body, entirely vulnerable out there in that chair, and all at once, she's seized by panic. What if the machine fritzes? What if there's a power outage? Or an earthquake?

She hears voices in the background, but it feels like the sound is coming from far away.

"We don't need to wait here, not all of us. We could go outside, have lunch."

"Eugh, feels too much like Joseph's brothers."

"Who?"

Read-only mode, Daisy said, which means he'll be fine, at least for this part. The machine is just taking a backup now, so that if anything _does_ go wrong during the decryption stage, it'll be easy to fix. The process is perfectly safe.

"From the Bible? After they dumped him in the pit, they sat down to eat?"

"We didn't exactly dump him in a pit."

"Hopefully not."

Bobbi looks back at the screen and lets herself get lost in the progress bar. The backup is incrementing by one percentage point about every ten seconds, and the bottom one, which is labeled Decryption, will presumably once the backup is done.

Bucky walks up next to her and hands her a sandwich. "Need some entertainment?" he asks.

She forces a smile. "You came prepared?"

He holds up a stack of Archie comic books in his left hand.

Despite herself, a laugh escapes, and she helps herself to one of the books he's holding. "Thanks, Bucky Barnes."

He turns to Natasha. "How about you, Widow?"

She looks at him suspiciously. "Do I like those?" It's the first time she's slipped.

"You'll just have to read one and find out, won't you?"

Natasha takes two of them, then sits against the wall and makes herself comfortable. Bucky continues handing out food and books, then sits across from Natasha, leans back against the wall, and closes his eyes.

Eden and Daisy end up wandering around the facility, checking out Stark's toys. Bobbi tries to read, but no matter how hard she tries, she can't quite summon the mental wherewithal needed to immerse herself in the world of Archie's gang and their formulaic shenanigans. She ends up glancing at the screen multiple times a minute, and eventually she gives up pretending that she's doing anything else but watching the numbers progress. It's slow going, but her focus is razor sharp, and when the top bar finishes and the bottom bar starts, she begins to get nervous again. Nothing happens, though—the entire process runs completely smoothly, if slowly, and _finally_ , the number on the bottom bar switches over to say 100%, and a window pops up on the screen—

"It's done," Daisy says.

Natasha's head snaps up at the announcement. Daisy is pulling away the equipment around Clint's head, but she leaves the restraints on his body. "He should come to any second," Daisy says.

She puts down the (exceedingly silly, she doesn't enjoy it at all) book and goes to stand on the left of Clint's chair, across from Bobbi, who hasn't moved from the folding chair she brought over earlier. She examines Clint's face, can see his eyelids flutter, and then they open.

"Back with us, Barton?" Daisy asks matter-of-factly.

"Um," he says in response. His voice is husky, and he blinks hard a few times.

"And there's his catchphrase," Natasha says.

He clears his throat to protest. " _Mean_."

"Did it work?" Daisy asks. "Try to focus, Barton. Do you remember?"

"Oh, that." He closes his eyes again, and then, "Oh." He swallows, and squeezes his eyes shut, like he's trying to make it go away. "Any chance you gave me the wrong memories?"

"That's not really how this works," Daisy says.

He sighs and opens his eyes, gaze landing on Bobbi, who suddenly looks very small in her five-foot-nine frame. "You were there."

Bobbi nods.

Clint swallows. "We left you behind."

She closes her eyes, nods again.

"We were on a mission, to assassinate Forson, and—," he cuts himself off, and frowns. "I don't really understand, Nick shot him, and then all hell broke loose, and then Maria Hill was giving orders instead of Daisy, and then we left. All of a sudden I remembered that you had skipped the mission. Only, it wasn't true, you hadn't skipped it, you were still there."

"Yeah, I was there." Her face, usually so expressive and open, is as tight as a vise, as she fills in the blanks. "I was inside. Forson had used a decoy originally, and then I saw him. I was lining up for the kill shot and I didn't know about the structural reorganization, and... Hill couldn't talk me down, so she used their magic word on me and stopped me that way."

Natasha doesn't gasp, due to years of training and experience, but she does feel a little shocked at that. With her mind wiped, Bobbi wouldn't have known… anything. She wouldn't have understood what she was doing on A.I.M. Island, wouldn't even have known her way around the base or who their double agent, the only person on the island looking out for her, was.

"And then we came back, and then you got shot, and you died, but it wasn't really you, it was a trick. Oh, my God. I gave the order to take off." Clint sounds shattered. "Oh, no. I'm so, so sorry."

Bobbi looks at him, smiles a smile that doesn't reach her eyes, and speaks lightly. "Nothing to be sorry about, sport. Lots of us have done much worse under mind control."

"Still, I—"

"Don't worry about it." Bobbi looks around the room. "Well. Now he remembers. Mission accomplished. Good job, team. I… need to go."

"Wait—"

But she's already gone, her blond ponytail swinging behind her as she hustles into the front hallway where they came from. He tries to get up, but he's still strapped in.

"I wouldn't get up for the next fifteen minutes," Daisy says. "Eden, can get you get Barnes to the car and then come back for me and Bobbi? Widow, you stay with Clint until the time is up, then you can unstrap him. Eden?"

Eden nods. "I got you."

There's a flash of light, and when it fades, Manifold and Barnes are gone.

Daisy approaches Clint with a pen flashlight in her hands, which she shines in his eyes like a doctor checking for a concussion. "Clint, how are you feeling? Any headaches or physical weirdness?"

"I'm fine," he says, sounding anything but.

"Let me know if anything changes. I'm going to check on Bobbi." She walks off in the direction where Bobbi disappeared.

Clint bangs his head against the headrest. "I should be doing that."

"You should be following orders," Natasha insists, cupping his chin to hold him still.

He sulks. "You're one to talk."

"Do as I say…"

He finally stops struggling, so she lets go of his chin. "You knew about all this, didn't you," Clint says.

"Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"What do you think all this," she waves her hand around the room, "has been about?"

He sighs and runs his fingers through his hair. "What am I going to say to her?"

She gives a cynical smile. "I'm not the one you ask for advice on what to say to people."

"I guess not." He closes his eyes. "Bobbi warned me that I might be upset by what I found out."

"A bit of an understatement, huh?"

"I could just _kill_ Hill. I could just..."

"I know."

"She made me leave Bobbi behind enemy lines. I would never, I would _never_ leave her behind enemy lines, especially with a wiped brain, oh my God, and they made me do that." His voice is starting to get frantic, and she repeats, "I know," trying to soothe him.

"If there's anything I would never do…" he continues, and then snorts. "But I don't need to tell you, you know all about being made to do things that you would never do. Except S.H.I.E.L.D. is supposed to be the good guys. Dammit." He closes his eyes. "Thank you, Nat. It sucks, but it's better that I know."

She puts her hand on his head and strokes his hair, trying to be reassuring.

"I mean it, thank you. I wish… if only we could do this for you. I think that if you could recover the memories you're missing, I think you would be happy. You were happy, before."

"Please don't tell me about my lost memories," she says automatically, but it's too late—the idea of her having been so happy that her friends felt it for her, missed it on her behalf, so long afterwards, that's something to be curious about.

Bobbi doesn't want to be seen running, but she needs to get out of there. She's barely holding it together, and she has to get somewhere where no one can find her—where no one can see her like this. She can feel her the thickness in her throat, and she starts to take deep breaths, trying to regulate her emotions. She makes it to the bathroom and locks herself inside, then leans against the door. In through the nose, out through the mouth, in through the nose—

Her inhale ends in a gasp, and she sinks onto the floor. She wants to scream, but she can't draw in enough breath at a time, and all that comes out is a string of sobs as her body shudders with each ragged breath.

She can't explain why it's now, of all times, that it's hitting her like this. Ever since the moment Maria Hill wiped her brain in the middle of enemy territory, she's just been moving forward, one step at a time, and this is the first time she's had a chance to stop and let herself feel it. She's having flashbacks to when she first saw Clint and Natasha in the apartment, those first few moments where she thought they were there for her, before he opened his mouth and disabused her of the notion. Some self-indulgent, self-pitying voice in her head taunts her: _They abandoned you, they left you to die and nobody noticed and nobody cared_. She knows it's not true, but she can't make it shut up, and she wants it to go away, this feeling of smallness, and the shame… she was so stupid, so _stupid_ to have willingly given up control of her own mind to anyone else.

Bobbi cries until her body is drained, and then she gets up and looks in the mirror. She pulls off her glasses to check the damage. Her eyes are red, but the rest of her face isn't as bad as she would have expected. And with her tinted lenses, it'll be possible to mask it. It's not like she'll fool anyone, but she doesn't want it to be too obvious what a wreck she is, so she turns on the sink and gives her face a good rinse, until she looks almost normal, then dries it all with a paper towel.

Looking back in the mirror, she blinks a few times, then tries out a few different smiles in the mirror, finally settling on one before she unlocks the door and steps out. Daisy's out in the hallway, but a respectable distance away, so that they can both pretend she didn't hear the entire thing.

"Hey. You ready to go back?" Daisy asks. "Eden's taking us in shifts, so we don't need to wait."

She's never been so grateful for Daisy's cool head as she is this moment. "Yeah. I'm ready to go."


	6. Chapter 6

When Natasha arrives back at the apartment with Clint, everything is wrong. That is to say, everyone is aggressively pretending that everything is normal. They're all a bunch of liars, and nobody wants to break the ice, including her. Bobbi and Daisy go for a grocery run, and they all prepare dinner together for the first time, so there's lots of talk about carrots and ground meat and how fresh the tomatoes look and the crispness of the lettuce.

The _crispness_ of the _lettuce_.

They sit down to eat, and it's even worse.

"This is really good lasagna," Bobbi says, taking seconds.

"Delicious," Daisy agrees.

Nobody has any dissenting opinions on the lasagna, so they don't talk for another few minutes, and then Bobbi asks, "Who wants some salad?"

"I'll take some," Bucky says, reaching his hand out. "Can I get some more lasagna, too? It's great."

Natasha's tempted to throw the lasagna out the window.

After dinner, Daisy goes into her room to work on the files, and Bobbi yawns the most transparently fake yawn ever and says that she's going to turn in early tonight. She leaves the room, and it's just Natasha with the two boys. They finish loading the dishwasher and then stand around in silence for a few minutes, until Clint says, decisively, "I'm going to talk to her."

Natasha nods, but he's not even looking. He walks off, leaving her alone with Barnes for the first time since they all met up.

They hear a knocking, and then the bedroom door opens and closes.

"That's going to be quite a conversation," Barnes says.

"Yeah." Natasha looks in the direction of the bedroom. "How much did you know?"

"She told me the whole story—as much as she knew, anyway. It sounds harsh."

"It's just an awful combination of circumstances. Anyone but Hill would have stopped her verbally. And if they needed to retreat and leave her behind, anyone but Clint would have done it of their own free will—reluctantly, fine, but still—and she would have understood it, too."

He frowns. "The impression I'm getting is that Hill is pretty trigger-happy with the mind control."

"I wouldn't say 'happy,' exactly, but, yeah. She's very much a 'needs of the many' person." At his blank look, she says, "Star Trek? No?"

He smiles sheepishly. "I'm still working on catching up on all pop culture created between 1945 and 2010."

"Right," she says. "Well, the line is, 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,' and that's basically her motto. She does what she think is the best thing for the long-term, and she doesn't really get close to people, so that she doesn't have to think about what it means that she regularly wipes the minds of her employees, whose well-being she's technically responsible for."

"Not you, though."

She feels a little bit judged by that, but she tries not to let it show. "I don't think so, not to the same extent. I see some of myself in her, sure—"

"That's not what I mean," he interrupts. "I mean, she didn't wipe your mind."

"What are you talking about? They did it to all of us."

"Please. You never had those nanobots implanted," Bucky says, matter-of-factly. "You would never agree to that, not even for a good cause, not after all you've been through."

Natasha is shocked for a second, so shocked that she lets it show. He's right, of course. It's just, he keeps surprising her, and every time he does, it knocks her off balance. This is such a big part of her life that she doesn't remember.

She's given herself away by her silence, and he smiles to himself, and suddenly she's infuriated. It's not _fair_ that he should know so much about her, while he's just a name and a face. "Good for you," she snarls.

When he sees her expression, his face falls. "No, Natasha, I didn't mean— _God_ , I'm sorry."

His expression is so genuine, so concerned. Seeing his distress at having hurt her, her anger instantly morphs into something else, something strange and warm. She's still agitated, but she's starting to feel the attraction that hasn't been there until now, and she wants more.

"You're right," she says. "I would never let them control my mind, but I let them believe they did."

"That's my girl." She thinks that slipped out by mistake—he's not supposed to say things like that, but his eyes are so full of pride—for her?—and admiration, that she can't find it in herself to rebuke him.

She leans closer, just an inch, just enough to to make them both aware of the distance.

"You know me so well," she murmurs, leaning closer, her eyes half-lidded. She wonders if he put his hands on her, if it would feel familiar, if her body would know his.

She can hear him swallow, see the muscles in his jaw moving, and she wants to—she wants to feel those little muscles with her fingertips, to examine him, to learn this man that she must have loved. He must have been incredible. She wants to understand.

He doesn't back away when she closes the distance between them, when she places her lips against his. He doesn't do anything when she takes one hand and wraps it around the back of his head, and the other one to his heart. His mouth is soft, and he lets her in, but he doesn't return the kiss.

She pulls back, and looks at him, trying to figure him out.

"Maybe even better than I know myself?" she says.

" _Natalia_." His voice cracks, this big strong man with the metal arm, who looks like he's utterly lost.

"Will you remind me?" she asks softly.

He looks shattered. "No. Not like this."

The rejection doesn't sting. It doesn't matter to her; he's practically a stranger. And, in any case...he's right. He's absolutely right. "Of course." She takes a step back, leans against the table, tries to look casual.

"So, how did you get out of it?" Bucky asks. "The nanobots."

"Well, they put the nanobots in me, just like everyone else. But what they didn't know is that months earlier, after what happened with Novokov, I had gone to Tony, and told him I'd had it with people playing around with my head. I asked him to develop something to make sure it would never happen again."

"And he did?"

"He created this program, an injection of nanobots of his own, and it works kind of like an inoculation. Recognizes suspicious activity and foreign objects and so on and neutralizes whatever it finds. It can't restore memories that were already deleted, though, which is why we needed the other machine."

Bucky looks suitably impressed. "That's really useful. It sounds more comprehensive than what they gave me, anyway."

She doesn't know what he's talking about, which is frustrating, but she's starting to get used to it, and she continues. "Yeah, but he's being annoying about it. He's terrified that someone will get their hands on it and reverse engineer it, so he swore me to secrecy and he's sitting on it for now. Well, now it's extended to the rest of you, too. That day when I went off on my own, I was successful in convincing him to get me more doses. I gave Clint one, but Clint and Daisy just know that it just scrambles the frequency, so that S.H.I.E.L.D. can't find him through the nanobots they gave him—usually, it notifies their systems when someone tries to get around the wipes. I wanted to wait to make sure it would work before I told everyone the full story."

"So how was the thing back at the lab able to decrypt his memories?" he asks. "Isn't that considered a foreign object?"

"Theoretically, yes, but since both designs are by Tony, he allows for the application of the encryption/decryption algorithm under certain conditions. I could temporarily allow for the encryption of my memories by saying a certain passcode, and it uses a checksum to allow for the decryption."

"Glad I asked." Bucky laughs, his face transmitting the fact that he understood about a third of what she'd just said. Well, now she knows one more thing about him.

"Basically, Tony designed it so that someone could be protected against someone else trying to brainwash them, but still wanting a way to hide their memories even against torture, telepathy, etc. Kind of like what the Secret Avengers originally intended. So you can use a verbal password and go through the process to 'erase' the memories, and then once the danger has passed, you can get them back, because there's a built-in exception."

He nods. "That's...wow. When are you going to tell everyone?"

She shrugs. "My original plan was to bring it up tonight, but I guess I should let the Bartons work out their issues first. And who knows when we'll see Daisy again. Once she starts working, she loses all sense of time."

"Right." Bucky looks around at the empty room, and she realizes that she feels comfortable, that she's been able to relax and let her guard down talking to him this entire time. A doubt crosses her mind, and she wonders if the reason she feels at ease is because she knows she's supposed to feel at ease with him, and this second-guessing just won't do.

"Do you want to watch TV?" Bucky asks, at the same time that Natasha says, "I'm going to go finish up a book I'm—"

"Oh," they say, flustered, at the same time.

"I mean—" she starts.

"It's okay," Bucky says. "Go read. I'm fine out here."

She gives him what probably comes out as an awkward smile. "I'll see you in the morning."

"Good night, Na— Natasha."

Bobbi's just putting away her yoga mat when there's a knock on the door. "Come in," she calls.

Clint enters, closing the door behind him.

"Hey," she says, trying to be casual, as if she hasn't been avoiding him all afternoon.

"Hey." He stands by the door, as if waiting for a second invitation.

"What's…" she trails off, realizing that playing dumb is ineffective. This isn't going to just go away. "Come in," she says again.

He comes over, seating himself on her side of the bed. "You ran out on me this morning."

"I'm sorry."

"Oh my God, never apologize to me again, Bobbi—I could spend my entire life at your feet and still feel sick about what I did, leaving you behind there like that." It comes out like a burst dam, one continuous stream of thought. "You don't owe me _anything_."

She sits down next to him, the ice inside her starting to thaw. "It wasn't your fault; you know that, right? I don't _blame_ you."

"Maybe not, but I did it. I remember doing it. It's like I'm two different people. Losing my memories and then getting them back again—the me who was having wacky adventures with Nat and Jess and Fury Jr. and Phil and the me who was sick over having abandoned you in the field, who held you as you died in his arms, _again_ , but it wasn't really you, _again_ , and then—you know, the first thing happened after the second thing, but in my memories… it feels like a parallel timeframe or something. I feel _awful_."

Isn't this what she wanted to hear? That all of this crap is hitting him as hard as it is her? This should be making her feel better, but for some reason, it's not working.

Then he turns to face her, putting on leg up on the bed, and says, "Okay, now your turn."

"For what?"

"I didn't come here just to talk; I want to hear what you have to say. What was it like for you?"

"What, so you can beat yourself up about it some more? Come on, Clint. I'm not going to do that."

"That's not why," he says. "I just think you need to talk about it and have someone listen. And I want to let you know, that...I'm here. If that's what you want."

"Oh. Thanks." She thinks about it, trying to describe what she felt at the time. "It was...it was weird. I also had that thing, with the different versions of me remembering things at different times. This brainwashing thing is so messed up; it shouldn't be allowed."

"Agreed."

"Anyway, it's not like I felt abandoned at the time, you know? I was just confused. I was in the camotech for, like, half a week, and I didn't know it. So I didn't understand why I was in the body of some A.I.M. researcher. And, fine, I'm trained as a spy, I try to make the best of it, and then I get caught out, and it's back to Bobbi, and then they manipulated my brain even more, and some memories came back, and Forson tried to implant these fake memories into me of my having been involved with A.I.M. way back when, to turn me, and he was winning, and then you showed up to rescue me, and—at that point, I wasn't thinking anymore, I was just running on instinct. My brain was, _wzzzzzzh_ , fried, and it didn't really turn back on again until after I knocked Forson out and had to escape. All of a sudden, I needed to use my brain again, and I remembered where I was and what Hill had done. I think whatever Forson did unlocked my erased memories, so I guess S.H.I.E.L.D.'s method isn't foolproof." She laughs bitterly. "Too bad for them. Anyway, then I was just angry. Not at you, not even at Hill, just angry in general. At the world, I don't know. I didn't understand why she did it until I got in touch with Daisy, and she explained what had happened."

"Oh, God."

"And I was doing okay with that, I think," she says slowly, trying to find the words. "I understand not wanting to start a war. I understand that either she has faith in my abilities to extract myself, or she thinks the stakes are so high that it's worth it if I just don't make it back, I really do.

"But I didn't know until you told me what had made you all leave A.I.M. Island. I'd thought it was just a strategic retreat. And when you said that, that she did that, it made me realize how fragile it all is, everything that we are. Hill made you think that I was safe, like it was nothing, and that was your truth. Then you quit, and 'Reverie,' suddenly the Secret Avengers are some wacky-zany-lovable-weirdo team that you love being in. You know? Some off-the-rails assassin digs into Natasha's head, all of a sudden she's never heard of the person she loves most in the world. Anyone could just snap their fingers, and our pasts become meaningless."

He wipes his eyes. "Shit, Bobbi." He laughs at his own vulnerability, something she's always appreciated about him, and puts his arm around her, pulling her in for a hug, wrapping his arms around her waist. "Ugh, this world."

"Yeah, good summary." She says, squeezing him back.

He pulls back just a fraction, to look her in the eyes, and she meets his stare. She's anxious, not knowing what's going to happen next, and her nerves are all on edge—even though she knows better, knows that slipping into sex with emotions running high would be disastrous, she doesn't want him to let go.

What does happen next is that Clint slides his hands up her back so that he's cupping her shoulder blades, and says, "I wish I could tell you that would never happen. But you're too smart to fall for that." His eyes light up suddenly, like he has an idea. "Can I give you a back rub, or something?"

"Sure," she says, both relieved and disappointed. No, not disappointed. Her ex-husband's back rubs are the stuff of legend.

He kicks off his shoes and moves to the back of the bed, leaning against the headboard, and she sits in front of him, his legs surrounding hers. He pulls her back so that she's leaning back into his arms, and for a split second—for such a split second that she can't tell whether or not it's an accident—his face is buried in the crook of her neck, as he edges the straps of her tank top down over her arms.

She hopes he can't tell that she feels like she's on fire—it's been so long—and it's a bad idea, but she wants him to make a move, to slip his hand somewhere dangerous, somewhere sensitive. Instead, he gathers her long hair together and lays it over her right shoulder, then presses his thumb against the revealed skin at the left side of her neck, brushing downwards towards the top of her spine, and she suppresses a shiver. He shuffles back a bit, then puts two warm, strong arms on her shoulders, and gets to work, squeezing the outsides of her shoulders and slowly working his way inwards. The massage feels so good it almost cures her arousal. Surely, this is better than sex.

"Mmmm, working off the guilt?" she teases.

"Something like that." His fingers dig into the muscles right by her neck, working out knots she's been carrying around forever, or so it seems. "If you want to hear something twisted, I was kind of mad at you when the image inducer turned off and it turned out that Yelena was dead, not you. I mean, I didn't want you to be dead, obviously, but I was mad at you for putting me through that pain, as if you could have somehow gotten me a message so I would have known. It's stupid."

"It was stupid of _me_ to be hurt by the fact that you guys left me there and brought Yelena back with you, even though that was exactly my plan."

"Yeah, that is kind of stupid." He laughs, but not maliciously.

"So we're both stupid. I think everyone is stupid sometimes about that kind of thing. You know. The heart and the mind aren't always in line with each other."

"I guess."

He moves down her back, avoiding her ticklish areas. After a few seconds, he says, "Rhodey quit, too."

"Oh. Good for him. I'm glad to hear that."

"Yeah, Hill erased his memories too, then sent him off. I guess he's back to his normal life."

She looks over her shoulder at him. "You think we should tell him?"

"I do," he says.

"He grew up around here, didn't he?"

"Something like that." He wraps up the massage by pressing his all of his fingers on her nape against the back of her head, which actually makes her moan out loud, then he runs his fingers through her hair and sits back. "All done."

She moves over so that she's sitting next to him, sides pressed against each other because she still needs a little bit of physical contact. Bobbi's knees are pulled up by her chest, and Clint's legs are stretched out and crossed at the ankles.

"About Rhodey," Bobbi says. "It's possible that he might be better off not knowing. After all, he wasn't dragged back like you were."

He shakes his head. "I think that if he knew what he didn't know, he'd want to know."

"Very eloquent." She laughs. "I guess you're right."

There's a knock at the door, then, and a few seconds later, Natasha opens it a crack and peeks her head in.

"Hey, Nat," Clint says. "Come on in."

"Did you two make up?" Natasha asks, walking over to her area of the room, then leaning over in front of her suitcase and starting to rifle through it.

"We're good," Bobbi says.

"That's good." Natasha pulls out some clothing from the suitcase.

"So, we were thinking—" Bobbi pauses as Natasha walks into the bathroom. The door is left open, so she figures Natasha is still open to conversation. "We were talking about Rhodey."

Natasha sticks her head out. "What about him?"

"We think we should bring him in."

There's silence for a few seconds, and then Natasha comes out, having changed into a black oversized t-shirt and blue and white striped shorts, and sits down on the bed. "Specifically him? Are we making a new team of ex-Secret Avengers?" Her voice expresses curiosity, but no judgment as to whether or not she thinks this is a good idea.

"Well, both of us had our minds wiped," Clint says. "It's not fair for me to get mine back and not him."

Natasha doesn't say anything for a minute. She crosses her arm over her chest, and looks between them, her expression carefully schooled. As usual, Bobbi wishes she had an inkling of a clue as to what Natasha is thinking.

Finally, she says, "Yeah, okay."

Bobbi and Clint exchange looks.

"Well, great," Bobbi says.

"We need to check with Fury before giving out his address, though," Natasha says. "I'll call him. And Tony. I need to explain everything to him. Otherwise he's going to notice that people keep using his inventions without writing their names on the sign-in sheet and he's going to get even more paranoid than he already is. Oh, speaking of which," she pulls out a cardboard box from next to her bed, "this is my collection of burner phones. Feel free to use them whenever you need, just make sure to use and dispose of them at least a mile away from the apartment."

"Awesome." Clint pushes himself off Bobbi's bed and starts in the direction of the phones. "I'm going to call Kate and check on Lucky."

"I said when there's a _need_. Not because you miss your dog, who is in perfectly capable hands."

Clint stops and crosses his arms, pouting. "I just don't want him to forget about me."

" _Clint_ ," Bobbi and Natasha say at the same time.

"Okay, okay." He holds up his hands and backs away. "I get it." He heads towards the door. "I'm going to go out for a walk. I'll see you guys later." He steps out, closing the door behind him.

They both stay up reading for a while, until the words start to blur together for her, and she sets her book down and goes to the bathroom to wash up. While she goes through her routine, she reviews the evening in her mind. Getting out her feelings was cathartic, and she didn't feel petty confessing to her illogical complaints, because Clint was ready to listen and share in return. It's a stark contrast to the way he was, all those years ago, when he found out what had happened with the Phantom Rider and didn't support her. And she's changed, too—thinking about when she first returned to Earth after her years with the Skrulls, how terrified she'd been that everything good in her life was just another illusion, that the carpet would be pulled out from underneath her any second, how she would never let herself truly trust him, pulling away from him time after time after time. It's too late, of course, but hypothetically….

She stops her train of thought quickly, and spits out her toothpaste.

After getting the okay from Fury, and then an hour-long phone call to Tony the next morning, Natasha returns to the apartment and calls a group meeting in the living room. She has the briefcase on the coffee table, and she explains to everyone what she told Bucky last night, about Tony's mind control vaccine and the extra doses in the case. They're all surprised, but no one as much as Clint, who seems to take it as a personal betrayal.

"I thought we were in this together," he gripes.

"This all happened months before S.H.I.E.L.D. approached us," Natasha says. "At that point, I had to improvise. And I didn't realize how extreme it would be. Once I did…"

"You got him out," Bobbi finishes. "And you inoculated him, too?"

Clint looks shocked at this. "You _what_?"

"The shot I gave you, the night before we broke into Tony's lab," Natasha says.

"You told me that it would stop the S.H.I.E.L.D. nanobots from transmitting my location!"

"Well, it does that, too."

He takes a deep breath, and then bursts out with, "What the hell, Nat? You lied to me!"

She's taken aback by the intensity of his reaction. They disagree on her methods all the time, but she's rarely seen him this angry, and she tries to explain. "It's Tony's invention, and he's been extremely secretive about this. When he first gave it to me, it was on condition that I never, ever tell anyone about it, and it wasn't easy for me to convince him that the rest of you needed it, too."

"The rest of us?" Daisy repeats, cutting in. "Even though our memories are basically intact?"

Natasha shakes her head. "It's two different things. The inoculation can't restore memories that were previously tampered with, obviously, because… well, the two of you, " she nods towards Daisy and Bobbi, "you still have the triggers. Theoretically, if Hill got to you, she could do whatever she wanted with your minds. Not to mention what would happen if someone with even fewer scruples got access to the program. And Barnes…," they exchange a look of understanding, "well, they planted the nanobots on us without our permission, and you never know. In any case, I wasn't going to leave you out."

"So, just checking, you're going to shoot us up with this stuff, and then we don't have to worry about S.H.I.E.L.D. anymore?" Daisy asks.

"The mindwipes will no longer be a threat," Natasha confirms. "If S.H.I.E.L.D. wants to come after us in other ways—well, they're S.H.I.E.L.D., they can—but in all likelihood, they still consider us resources, not threats, and it's in our best interests to stay that way. We should still try to stay off their radar."

"Well," Daisy says. "That's good and all, but the way you went about it… Barton is right. This is a team, Widow, and you can't keep secrets from us like this again. And don't you even think about saying anything about my age, because you know I'm right. Your teammates need to be able to trust you."

Natasha finishes out the argument in her head, both sides of it: _It was Tony's secret, not mine. Tony gave permission to tell anyone getting the injection. I wanted to make sure it would work. You can't expect your teammates to trust you when you keep secrets. You can't be on a team with the Black Widow and not expect her to keep secrets. You need to learn how to trust other people enough to share your secrets with them_.

"I'll try," is all she says.

Natasha opens the briefcase, which contains three full needles and an empty one, as well as a bunch of individually wrapped sterilizing wipes, gauze pads, and bandages. "Now, who's going first?"

The three of them present their arms at the same time.

She takes care of the injections quickly, and as Natasha is covering the gauze on Bobbi's arm with a bandage, Daisy turns to Bobbi and says, "After this, can you come with me? I have some things to show you."

"We're all done here," Natasha says, and so the two of them head to Daisy's room/office. Natasha finishes cleaning up, collecting wrappers to toss out, and locking up the briefcase with the empty needles inside. Clint is hovering the entire time, and when she finishes, he gives her a look, jaw tight, and says, "We need to talk."

Natasha glances at Bucky, who's pretending not to hear anything, then looks back at Clint and nods. "Your room?"

"My room."

She follows him there, and he opens the door for her, then closes it behind them. After the door clicks closed, he whirls on her, visibly angry. "Okay, Daisy might be okay with your empty promise to 'try' and stop with the manipulations, but you can't put me off that easily."

She tries again to make him understand. "It was for the best, Clint. You got back what you needed, and we did it without pissing Tony off. Don't you get it? This is a win."

"I don't care about—" He cuts himself off, and starts speaking more calmly. "Okay, I sound like I'm ungrateful. I really appreciate what you did for me, I do."

"So what's the problem?"

"It's just, when you keep me in the dark like that until the very end of a mission, it feels like you think I'm a child who can't handle sensitive information or else he might screw the whole thing up."

She takes in his words, tries them out in her head. She hadn't thought that he might see it that way, but now that she considers it—

"Oh my God." He looks stricken. "That's _exactly_ what you think."

"That's not—"

"Yes, it is." He's starting to pick up steam. "You picked me up at home, specifically at a time when I wouldn't remember anything. You didn't tell me about Bobbi," he starts counting on his fingers, "didn't tell me about quitting the team, didn't tell me that you were going to Tony, didn't tell me what the shot did, didn't tell me _anything_ until it all worked out and there was absolutely no chance that I could ruin it. Because that's who I am, Hawkeye the fuckup who destroys everything he touches."

"Clint."

"Don't you 'Clint' me, _Natasha_! You've _never_ trusted in me. We work next to each other every day, and you _always_ treat me like a toddler. I'm good for hired muscle, but that's it. I can't believe it's taken me so long to see it."

She presses her fingers against her temple, trying to think of what to say to defuse the situation, but she's not—she's not great with friendships or with balancing honesty with sensitivity, and she doesn't know what to say. "I don't think you're a fuckup."

"A ringing endorsement." He shakes his head, looking like he's given up a fight. "Forget it. I… I can't do this right now." He opens the door and walks out without looking back.

Daisy sits down on her bed, making a space for Bobbi to sit next to her, and starts pulling up windows. She points to one of the screens and says, "I'd like your opinion on this."

It's a report about some sort of project, lots of abbreviations, some familiar and some foreign. Bobbi skims the first few pages, and looks up. "Looks like they're working on a virus."

"How bad?"

"Well, the mice in Group A all died, but only half of the mice in Group B did."

"Oh, good," Daisy says. "I'm really happy for half the mice in Group B."

"Well, in the first batch, all the mice in both groups died."

"Wonderful." Daisy presses her lips together, then says, "So, based on some of the email correspondence here, they're apparently ready for human testing. On the general population."

"On the general population."

"Yup."

"Well, I guess we have our mission—stop _that_ from happening."

"I haven't figured out yet how they're planning on disseminating it. They keep saying that they're trying to convince people to get on board with the plan, but I haven't found out what the plan is. There's a lot to comb through here, so what I'm going to do is split up the emails and reports and copy them over to my other devices, and ask everyone to take a look, make notes on anything that stands out, and hopefully we'll be able to get a clearer picture. I wanted to run the virus stuff by you first. Can you get everyone else in here?"

Bobbi goes out to the hallway. She registers Bucky in the living room and Clint walking down the hall in her direction, but she doesn't see Natasha. "Guys, Daisy has an update for everyone. In her room."

Clint brushes by her without a word or a look, which is very strange, and walks into Daisy's room, leaning against the wall closest to the door. Bucky gives her a kind of apologetic look before coming in, too. She goes back into the room, behind him, and a few seconds later, Natasha walks in, hanging back at the door. Clint shuffles away as Natasha joins them, even though he's nowhere near her.

Bobbi looks back and forth between the three of them. There's definitely a tension there. Clint is visibly upset, and Bucky and Natasha look uncomfortable, and she herself has no idea what's going on, but before she can start trying to figure it out, Daisy speaks up.

"I was able to decrypt the files," Daisy starts, and then she repeats the conversation from a few minutes ago. She finishes up with, "I want each of you skim all the correspondence and note anything that sticks out—names, places, dates, references, anything."

"All of us?" Bucky says.

"I know it's not what you're used to, but we don't have analysts working in the background here—it's just us. Not to mention, this is a great team with a lot of sharp minds, and I want to take advantage of it."

For some reason, this sets Clint off into a coughing fit.

Daisy pulls out some cables and two tablets and plugs them all into each other, then runs something from her own computer, while they watch. While it runs, she says, "Sorry about the lack of tablets, but I only packed for two lackeys. You'll need to split up into groups of two."

"I'll work with Bobbi," Natasha says quickly.

Clint smiles in an overly cheerful way at Bucky, and says, "I guess we're partners," which makes Bobbi understand that there was some sort of fight between Clint and Natasha, which unsettles her even more.

Daisy hands both groups a few pieces of lined paper from her legal pad, and a few hours later, Bobbi and Natasha have a bunch of code names, and the lunch orders of the entire data entry department of the Jersey branch. The last few emails they've seen are a long chain arguing over what pizza toppings to get, and Bobbi's eyes are glazing over. Natasha taps the "Next" arrow, and the message switches over.

 _We're confirmed at two locations for the promo on the 27th. A- 157 St, B-94 St. G & P have been enhanced (unstoppable) and will facilitate._

"What is _this_ ," Natasha says.

At the same time, Bobbi announces, "We've struck gold."

"Is this New York?" Natasha asks. "Could be anywhere."

"We have a lot of references to New York," Bucky says, from the second couch. "What do you have?"

Bobbi reads the email out loud, and there's a bustle of question and comments, all at the same time.

"The twenty-seventh is six days from now."

"What are these two locations?"

"What does 'enhanced' mean?"

"It doesn't sound good."

"What promo is on the twenty-seventh?"

"This would be a lot easier if we had internet access," Bobbi says. The apartment has none, a precaution, since it would be too easy for someone to slip up and log in to a traceable account.

"You're right," Natasha agrees, copying the text of the e-mail onto their paper and folding it up. "I'll go out to a public library and see what links I can get out of this."

"Do you need anyone else for that?" Daisy asks, which receives a bitter chuckle from Clint.

Natasha rolls her eyes. "Don't do that. It's just _research_ ," she says, in Clint's direction.

After she leaves, Daisy goes back into her bedroom, and Bucky heads to the kitchen. Bobbi gets up and takes the seat he's vacated next to Clint, who's still glaring daggers at the door.

"Want to talk about it?" she asks.

He turns and looks at her slowly, seeming almost surprised that she's there. For a second, she thinks he's going to open up, but then his face falls, and he shakes his head.

It hurts a little, after he listened to her fears and was there for her, that he won't allow her to do the same for him. This whole "ex" relationship is ambiguously defined and very confusing to navigate. For example, now, she doesn't know whether to push or let it go, but he gets up and walks away, and she decides not to follow. A minute later, she can hear the soft whacking sounds of darts hitting their target.

Eventually, Natasha returns. Clint seems to have mellowed out a bit, and they all meet back up around the coffee table as she tells them what she's found out.

"There's a flu shot promotional event at various clinics across the city on the 27th—get your flu shot, get a free donut, that kind of thing. And the clinics on 157th Street and on 94th Street are both participating."

"So they're replacing flu shots with their virus, and then they're going to track the victims and see how many of them survive?" Bucky asks.

"That's what it looks like," Natasha says.

"That's messed up." He grimaces.

"We still need to find out what 'enhanced' means," Bobbi cuts in. "If it were as simple as shutting down two clinics for one day, with six days notice, we could just hand it over to the police."

Daisy shakes her head. "The police won't touch anything A.I.M. related right now."

"We don't have to say that it's A.I.M," says Clint.

It still doesn't feel like a good idea to Bobbi, getting the police involved. "I don't know. 'Unstoppable' is kind of a red flag."

Daisy holds out the tablets again. "So...who's excited for more research?"


End file.
